The answer must be, No; not by any process now known. The similarity of chemical composition, and the increasing conviction of the universality of natural law and of evolution, have led to a very general belief that such a spontaneous generation of life must be possible, and numerous experiments have been made to produce it. For a time the balance seemed to be very evenly held between the supporters and opponents of spontaneous generation. In fact, starting from the assumption, which at first was common to both sides, that heat equal to the boiling point of water destroyed all life organisms, spontaneous generation had the best of it: for it was clearly proved that living organisms did appear in infusions contained in vessels which had been hermetically sealed, after being subjected to this, or even a higher degree of heat. But subsequent and more careful experiments have shown that the germs or spores of bacteria and other animalculæ, which are generally floating in the air, can, when dry, withstand a greater degree of heat, and that when the experiments are made in optically pure air no life ever appears and the infusions never putrefy. On questions of this sort all who are not themselves expert experimentalists must be guided by authority, and we may be content to accept the dictum of Huxley that biogenesis, or all life from previous life, was ‘victorious along the whole line.’ But in doing so we must accept Huxley’s caution, ‘that with organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the qualities called vital, may not some day be artificially brought together.’ And further, ‘that as a matter not of proof but of probability, if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time, to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through chemical and physical conditions which it can never see again, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasms from non-living matter.’ Such is the cautious candour with which scientific men approach problems upon which theologians dogmatise with the unerring intrepidity of ignorance.