ons old,--you must not
expect too much of it; it is not many years ago since it was said to be
perfectly impossible to fabricate any organic compound; that is to say,
any non-mineral compound which is to be found in an organized being. It
remained so for a very long period; but it is now a considerable number
of years since a distinguished foreign chemist contrived to fabricate
Urea, a substance of a very complex character, which forms one of the
waste products of animal structures. And of late years a number of other
compounds, such as Butyric Acid, and others, have been added to the
list. I need not tell you that chemistry is an enormous distance from
the goal I indicate; all I wish to point out to you is, that it is by no
means safe to say that that goal may not be reached one day. It may be
that it is impossible for us to produce the conditions requisite to the
origination of life; but we must speak modestly about the matter, and
recollect that Science has put her foot upon the bottom round of the
ladder. Truly he would be a bold man who would venture to predict where
she will be fifty years hence.

There is another inquiry which bears indirectly upon this question,
and upon which I must say a few words. You are all of you aware of the
phenomena of what is called spontaneous generation. Our forefathers,
down to the seventeenth century, or thereabouts, all imagined, in
perfectly good faith, that certain vegetable and animal forms gave
birth, in the process of their decomposition, to insect life. Thus,
if you put a piece of meat in the sun, and allowed it to putrefy, they
conceived that the grubs which soon began to appear were the result
of the action of a power of spontaneous generation which the meat
contained. And they could give you receipts for making various animal
and vegetable preparations which would produce particular kinds of
animals. A very distinguished Italian naturalist, named Redi, took up
the question, at a time when everybody believed in it; among others our
own great Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. You
will constantly find his name quoted, however, as an opponent of the
doctrine of spontaneous generation; but the fact is, and you will see it
if you will take the trouble to look into his works, Harvey believed
it as profoundly as any man of his time; but he happened to enunciate a
very curious proposition--that every living thing came from an 'egg'; he
did not mean to use the