“To enable us to say that we know anything about the experimental origination of organization and life, the investigator ought to be able to take inorganic matters, such as carbonic acid, ammonia, water, and salines, in any sort of inorganic combination, and be able to build them up into protein matter, and then that protein matter ought to begin to live in an organic form. That nobody has done as yet, and I suspect it will be a long while before anybody does do it. But the thing is by no means so impossible as it looks; for the researches of modern chemistry have shown us--I won’t say the road towards it, but, if I may so say, they have shown the finger-post pointing to the road that may lead to it.” _O agnus dei!_ lend me but a little of thy lamb’s patience, that so I may be able to smile at this tangle of profound absurdities, this _docta ignorantia_. And this they call weighing a difficult problem with “scientific circumspection”! It is not difficult, God wot, to be circumspect when it is the purely imaginary that is in question. For the famous Monsieur “Life” of whose organization and structure mention is made above has precisely as much actuality as that Mr. Table d’Hôte for whom the farmer from the country inquired. Such a being is the most effective of subjects for science, for it admits of being solved without remainder in learnedness. _Quousque tandem professores!_ No physicist would be so irrational as to say, “I see the wind--in the swaying bough of a tree and so forth; I hear, smell, feel, measure it; but where now is he--this Mr. Wind himself?” The biologist, however, manages to say, “I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think life; but where now is that unknown god ‘Life’ himself?” Once for all, Man, know that thy seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking--even were they biological tricks such as thine--are life itself; other life there is not. To seek to have it issue like some homunculus from the retort or the incubator--this oughtest thou rather to leave to the other poets--the genuine ones! It is far from my intention to embark upon polemics; but it is well-nigh impossible to pass anywhere near folly when it masquerades in the black of the most profound seriousness and resist the temptation to give it a good push, so that the public, by the fluttering of the rags, may recognize the hollow scarecrow. But after all, there is some sense in everything, even if this “sense” is oftentimes “non-sense!” This is one of the attempts made to bring life--as “cell”--and the facts of geology into harmony. The other runs as follows:--