An able writer in the _Daily News_ of last Friday is very severe upon the biological portion of the President’s address, which contains a really original hypothesis. Sir W. Thomson having stated that he is “ready to adopt as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life,” asks the question, “How then did life originate on the earth?” and tells us that “if a probable solution consistent with the ordinary course of nature can be found, we must not invoke an abnormal act of creative power.” He assumes, with that perfect confidence in mathematical hypotheses which is characteristic of the school of theorists which he leads, that “tracing the physical history of the earth backwards, on strictly dynamical principles, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe, on which no life could exist;” and then, to account for the beginning of life on our earth as it cooled down, he creates another imaginary world, which he brings in collision with a second similar creation, and thereby shatters it to fragments. He further imagines that one of these imaginary broken-up worlds was already stocked with the sort of life which he says can only proceed from life, and that from such a world thus stocked and thus smashed “many great and small fragments carrying seed and living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space;” and that, “if at the present instant no such life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call _natural_ causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.” The conclusion of this paragraph is instructively characteristic of the philosophy of Sir William Thomson and his admirers. He says that “the hypothesis that life originated on this earth through moss-grown fragments of another world may seem _wild and visionary_; all I maintain is that it is _not unscientific_.” I have italicized the phrases which, put together, express the philosophy of this school of modern manufacturers of mathematical hypotheses. It matters not to them how “wild and visionary,” how utterly gratuitous any assumption may be, it is not unscientific provided it can be invested in formulæ, and worked out mathematically. These transcendental mathematicians are struggling to carry philosophy back to the era of Duns Scotus, when the greatest triumph of learning was to sophisticate so profoundly an obvious absurdity that no ordinary intellect could refute it. Fortunately for the progress of humanity, there are other learned men who firmly maintain that the business of science is the discovery and teaching of simple sober truth.