It is furthermore to be borne in mind that Life has not any conscience and is utterly non-moral From a strictly scientific point of view this is not a matter of any consequence; for Science is concerned merely with existence _quâ_ existence and disregards the whole subject of ethical good and evil. Scientific men, however, have consciences and the knowledge of right and wrong, and are able, whenever they may feel so disposed, to judge of Life from the moral point of view. They see, for example, that the vitality of a living human being is just as active, efficient and exquisitely adaptative in the development of a painful disease as in the production of enjoyable health. They see that the fatal microbe is fostered and sent on its murderous way rejoicing, just as much as the phagocytes (the “blood scavengers”) and other defensive organisms are in like manner protected and caused to multiply. The cow is made to yield milk, while the cobra is equally aided to prepare a store of deadly poison. The bee is set to the beneficent work of honey-making; and the mosquito is granted a letter-of-marque for the dissemination of malaria. Everywhere in nature the same blindness to moral considerations and the same absence of ethical purpose are met with in the activities of Life. The question of how Life originates should also receive attention. Modern science rejects the idea of its being derived from inanimate matter or from any combination of matter with physical force or energy. The experiments of the late Dr. H. Charlton Bastian, F.R.S., and others with respect to the demonstration of “spontaneous generation” are held to be invalidated by various sources of error; and the almost unanimous verdict of the scientific world is that every occurrence of life proceeds from some antecedent, parent, life. This doctrine involves naturally the referring back of the entire amount of life now existing in the world to a long line of ancestry. And as Science teaches furthermore that a time did once exist when the world was altogether inorganic and inanimate, there emerges the problem of when and how Life made its first appearance on this mundane sphere. This problem is, as yet, insoluble; and, _faute de mieux_, certain scientists as, for example, Helmholz, Tyndall and Lord Kelvin have found themselves reduced to the necessity of suggesting that possibly the first specimen of life on the earth was introduced in the form of some organism borne hither by a meteorite. But such a suggestion does not solve the problem of Life; it merely throws back the solution by yet another stage. And in the meantime the remarks already made in the present chapter with regard to the capacity of indefinite increase displayed by Life are emphasised and confirmed in a prodigious degree. It is surely a most marvellous thing that the whole vast volume of existing life should be the product of some minute primordial quantity without