If we turn to the first chapter of Genesis, we shall see no suggestion or recognition of the supposed difficulty involved in the beginning of life upon the earth. In this immortal piece of ancient poetry it is stated that after the creation of the heaven and the earth, which were at first “without form and void,” God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass ... and it was so”; and later God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life ... let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.” Here we have suggested to us the natural origin of living creatures in earth and sea under the will and direction of the Creator as conceived by the poet. [Sidenote: First Ideas on the Origin of Life] [Sidenote: The Coming of Darwin] Partly to the influence of Genesis, partly to the apparent facts of observation, and partly to the views which would naturally be held by poets and thinkers, we may attribute the belief which has been held by man, simple and philosophic alike, since first men began to think, until, we may say, the third quarter of the nineteenth century--the belief that the lowest of living things arose by a natural genesis or so-called spontaneous generation in suitable materials already provided on the land or in the sea. It was not suggested or believed that very large and conspicuous living creatures were thus bred, though it is true that the ancients thought even crocodiles to be generated by the action of the sun upon the slime of the Nile. The living creatures supposed to arise naturally in the womb of earth--the all-mother--were mostly small creatures, like insects and worms. The ordinary belief of the uninstructed to-day--a belief which they share with the greatest thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance--is that the cheese-mite, for instance, is evolved from the substance of the cheese. Now, it is of particular moment to observe the vast contrast between the significance of this belief prior to the publication of “The Origin of Species” and its significance to-day. Before we accepted the doctrine of organic evolution, the supposed spontaneous origin of the cheese-mite in cheese, or of the maggot in putrid meat, was of no very great moment; a maggot or a cheese-mite is an extremely insignificant object. So far as the great problems of the universe are concerned, a cheese-mite, as we say, is neither “here nor there,” and its spontaneous generation was not regarded as a fact of any great moment.