[5] Zoonomia, Vol. II, p. 247, third edition, 1801. Darwin is here adopting David Hume’s conjecture, which is worked out in some detail in the Zoonomia, the conclusion being that probably “one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life” (p. 244). He attributed evolution to internal forces impressed on living matter by the Creator. [6] He taught that nature had produced a multitude of disconnected parts which afterwards combined and recombined at random until the appropriate parts had come together and remained stable. [7] Αἰὼν πάντα φέρει. δολιχὸς χρόνος οἶδεν ἀμείβειν Οὔνομα καὶ μορφὴν καὶ φύσιν ἠδὲ τύχην. Jac. Anth., II, 20. [8] “It has lately become the fashion, at least among the younger school of biologists, to attach small value to natural selection, if not, indeed, to regard it as a superseded formula.” (A. Weismann, The Evolution Theory, Engl. trans., II, 391.) [9] Text Book of Botany, p. 3. English translation by Dr. H. C. Porter, 1898. In the fifth German edition, which served as the basis of a revised English translation (1903), another passage (taking note of De Vries’ Mutations Theory) is substituted for the above quoted, but the essential meaning is the same. [10] Leitfaden in das Studium der experimentellen Biologie der Wassertiere, p. 67. The subject is ably treated by Keyserling, Das Gefüge der Welt, p. 190. [11] For instance, the development of an embryo in the womb takes place in strict accordance with physico-chemical laws. But withdraw the element which we call _life_ and how different a set of processes would at once supervene! Yet the physical energies in the embryo would remain in amount exactly what they were before. [12] See Weismann, The Evolution Theory, II, 358. [13] For my own part, I may say I have a difficulty in conceiving the Divine under the human and limited category of intelligent personality. [14] Das Gefüge der Welt, Hermann Graf v. Keyserling, 1906. [15] See Appendix A. [16] See Jagadis Chunder Bose, Response in the Living and the Non-Living, _passim_. The following passage sums up the results of many delicate experiments in the response to electrical stimulus. “We have seen,” writes the Indian physicist, “that the criterion by which vital response is differentiated is its abolition by the action of certain reagents—the so-called poisons. We find, however, that ‘poisons’ also abolish the response in plants and metals. Just as animal tissues pass from a state of responsiveness while living to a state of irresponsiveness when killed by poisons, so also we find metals transformed from a responsive to an irresponsive condition by the action of similar poisonous reagents” (p. 188).