organism, as complex and mature a product of evolution as a society, or, for the matter of that, as the atom of modern chemistry! But the reader will legitimately declare that so long as the spontaneous generation of life to-day in the most favourable circumstances is a proved impossibility, he cannot be expected to accept the doctrine of its spontaneous origin in the past. There are signs, however, that the biologists are now beginning to listen to Dr. Charlton Bastian, the sole survivor from the great controversy of the ’seventies, whose book, “The Evolution of Life,” was published only a few months ago. Against Pasteur and Tyndall and Huxley, Dr. Bastian maintained that their experiments, asserted to be conclusive, were not conclusive--the facts observed were certainly facts, but the deductions were unwarrantable. The experiments only proved the impossibility under the experimental conditions. The difference is the difference between proving what you set out to prove, and begging the whole question. First establish conditions under which spontaneous generation is impossible, then demonstrate its non-occurrence under those conditions, and thence infer that it is impossible under any conditions. [Sidenote: The Creed of the Future] The student is right in declining to believe in the spontaneous beginning of life upon the earth so long as the possibility of spontaneous generation to-day is denied, but there are not a few who think that the most conservative attitude that can be adopted is one of suspended judgment. The present philosophic tendency is undoubtedly in the direction of a return to the ancient conception that matter is not without its own degree of life, and that the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is a distinction of degree and not radical. Nature does not admit of being sorted into any of our puny categories. As the facts accumulate they point more and more definitely towards the opinion that hylozoism, or the doctrine of potential life in all matter, will be part of the scientific creed of the future. Controversies as to the origin of life, judged in the light of this great conception, seem to become trivial if not puerile. Knowing, as we now do, that Plato’s conception of matter was as false as it possibly could be, and having had revealed to us by radio-activity the omnipresence within the very atoms of matter, of forces incessant and stupendous, we find the doctrine of vitalism, however stated, to be wholly meaningless; we find that the gap between the living and the lifeless is by no means abysmal or impassable. [Sidenote: How Long Has Life Existed?]