[Footnote 1: Nicholson ("Zoology," p. 4) gives for Albumen, which is nearly identical with protoplasm--Carbon, 144; Hydrogen, 110; Nitrogen, 18; Oxygen, 42; Sulphur, 2. These figures nearly equal those in the text, being those figures multiplied each by 4 (approximately) and without the trace of sulphur.] And of course there is no answer to a supposition of this sort. Nevertheless there is no sort of reason to believe that protoplasm will ever be made; nor, if we could succeed in uniting the elements into a form resembling protoplasmic jelly, is there the least reason to suppose that such a composition would exhibit the irritability, or the powers of nutrition and reproduction, which are essentially the characteristics of _living_ protoplasm. It is not too much to say that, after the close of the controversy about spontaneous generation, it is now a universally admitted principle of science that life can only proceed from life--the old _omne vivum ex ovo_ in a modern form.[1] But here the same sort of argument that was brought forward regarding the possibility of matter and its laws being self-caused, comes in as regards life. [Footnote 1: _See_ "Critiques and Addresses," T.H. Huxley, F.R.S., p. 239. So much is this the case, that it is really superfluous, however interesting, to recall the experiments of Dr. Tyndall and others, which finally demonstrated that wherever primal animal forms, bacteria and other, "microbes," were produced in infusions of hay, turnip, &c., apparently boiled and sterilized and then hermetically sealed, there were really germs in the air enclosed in the vessel, or germs that in one form or another were not destroyed by the boiling or heating. Dr. Bastian's argument for spontaneous generation is thus completely overthrown. _(See_ Drummond, "Natural Law," pp. 62-63.)]