ifferent conditions then than we
find now, is contained in a recent pronouncement of one of the greatest
organic chemists in Europe, Professor Armstrong. He says that such
great progress has been made in his science--the science of the chemical
processes in living things--that "their cryptic character seems to have
disappeared almost suddenly." On the strength of this new knowledge of
living matter, he ventures to say that "a series of lucky accidents"
could account for the first formation of living things out of non-living
matter in Archaean times. Indeed, he goes further. He names certain
inorganic substances, and says that the blowing of these into pools by
the wind on the primitive planet would set afoot chemical combinations
which would issue in the production of living matter. [*]

* See his address in Nature, vol. 76, p. 651. For other
speculations see Verworn's "General Physiology," Butler
Burke's "Origin of Life" (1906), and Dr. Bastian's "Origin
of Life" (1911).

It is evident that the popular notion that scientific men have declared
that life cannot be evolved from non-life is very far astray. This
blunder is usually due to a misunderstanding of the dogmatic statement
which one often reads in scientific works that "every living thing comes
from a living thing." This principle has no reference to remote ages,
when the conditions may have been different. It means that to-day,
within our experience, the living thing is always born of a living
parent. However, even this is questioned by some scientific men of
eminence, and we come to the third view.

Professor Nageli, a distinguished botanist, and Professor Haeckel,
maintain that our experience, as well as the range of our microscopes,
is too limited to justify the current axiom. They believe that life may
be evolving constantly from inorganic matter. Professor J. A. Thomson
also warns us that our experience is very limited, and, for all we know,
protoplasm may be forming naturally in our own time. Mr. Butler Burke
has, under the action of radium, caused the birth of certain minute
specks which strangely imitate the behaviour of bacteria. Dr. Bastian
has maintained for years that he has produced living things from
non-living matter. In his latest experiments, described in the book
quoted, purely inorganic matter is used, and it is previously subjected,
in hermetically sealed tubes, to a heat greater than what has been found
necessary to k