Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life-forms have a common origin; plants and animals being alike built-up of matter which is identical in character. This doctrine, to-day a commonplace of biology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a capful of wind compared with that which raged round Huxley's lecture on The Physical Basis of Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a "Sabbath" evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People had settled down, with more or less vague understanding of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which represented the elementary substances entering into the composition of every living thing from a jelly-speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper to that bottle take their breath away! Microscopists, philosophers "so-called," and clerics alike raised the cry of "gross materialism," never pausing to read Huxley's anticipatory answer to the baseless charge, an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the essay of Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest idealism. "All the phenomena of Nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness." The cyclone thus raised travelled westward on the heels of Tyndall, when in 1874 he asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and inorganic; dashing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that "the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of the sun." The ancient belief in "spontaneous generation," which Redi's experiments upset, was the subject of Huxley's Presidential Address to the British Association in 1870. But while he showed how subsequent investigation confirmed the doctrine of Abiogenesis, or the non-production of living from dead matter, he made this statement in support of Tyndall's creed as to the fundamental unity of the vital and the non-vital.