[38] _Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist_, p. 48. [39] _Contemporary Review_, September, 1893. Darwin's Gemmule Theory is the same guessing; and Weismann rejects it because he did not think of it first. As a theory the gemmule plot is just as good and just as bad scientifically as Weismann's. The chief objection to such imagining is that after its authors have put it into print a few times they lose all sense of humor, and mistake phantasms for facts. Up to the present time we have discovered no living organism lower in grade than the cell. If life ever originated from inorganic matter, it appeared in an organized cell. The Weismann ids, biophors, and the rest, supposing they existed outside his own imagination, are not more capable of independent life than is a chromatin granule. In any event, these biophors could not have originated spontaneously in the first living being; and if they could not so have come into existence, life could never have begun. However primitive any organism is, it must be able to nourish itself and to develop into a higher specific form; but such a variety of functions supposes differentiated structure, composed of unstable chemical substances, a correlation of parts, a purposeful anticipation of ends. Inorganic substances, crystals, and the like are characteristically stable, not unstable; and these could not have been brought into the organic state on an earth burnt to a cinder and devoid of chlorophyl, which itself presupposes organic cells. Whence came also the absolutely essential form of energy, directive of vegetative life? The only possible explanation is that life was created, not evolved by a stranger miracle from a lump of lava.