Osborn, in his work on the “Origin and Evolution of Life,” also virtually starts by assuming that which he sets out to prove. He suggests that the initial step in the origin of life was the coördinating and bringing together of the then primordial elements of water, nitrates, and carbon dioxide, “which so far as we know had never been in combined action before.” Was their coming together a blind, fortuitous affair? Osborn assumes that these elements were gradually bound by a _new_ form of mutual attraction “out of which arose a new form of unity in the cosmos, an organic unity or organism. It was an application of energy new to the cosmos. In fact it was life.” “When the earth had in the course of its physical evolution become adapted as the abode of life, living substances came into being.” By their own independent action, or by what? In trying to account for happenings on the earth’s surface, we follow the chain of cause and effect. But when we try to explain origins, we are dealing with a chain which has only one end. Picted, a Swiss scientist, concluded that because all chemical action of the kind which goes on in living things is annihilated at one hundred degrees below zero Centigrade, therefore chemical action and life are one. But chemical action is as old as the earth. Is life as old? II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS I fancy I am not alone in having difficulty in uniting the two worlds--the living and the non-living--and in seeing them under the same law. In the one I see something like mind and purpose; every living thing shows something for which we have no name but intelligence. Organization demands an organizing principle. There is purpose in the wings of a bird, the legs of an animal, the fins of a fish, but where is there purpose in the orbs, in the comets, in the meteors? Or, to come down to the earth, where is there purpose in the mountains, in the stratified rocks, in the ocean, or in the air currents?