Prof. Le Conte labors hard to show that it might have come from the union of the four gases, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, under some peculiar circumstances. If he had said under the direct act of the Creator we could assent cheerfully. For these do enter into the substance which forms the bodies of living things. But the claim of Evolution is that all came by "resident forces," self-operating. Once admit the direct act of the Creator, and, as Haeckel says, they might as well admit it along the whole process, for the argument for a single instance is valid for the whole. So they will have none of it. Prof. Le Conte labors to show that protoplasm might be self-originating, but Prof. Conn says, "Protoplasm is not a chemical compound but a mechanism.... Unorganized protoplasm does not exist.... It could never have been produced by chemical process. Chemistry has produced starches, fats, albumens, but not protoplasm." (_Method of Evolution._) Lord Kelvin, in writing to the _London Times_, said: "Forty years ago I asked Liebig, walking somewhere in the country, if he believed that the grass and flowers which we saw around us grew by mere chemical forces. He answered, 'No, no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical forces.'" Tyndall, after laborious experiments during eight months, thus candidly states the result, in an address before the Royal Institute, London: "From the beginning to the end of the inquiry, there is not, as you have seen, a shadow of evidence in favor of the doctrine of spontaneous generation.... In the lowest, as in the highest of organized creatures, the method of nature is, that life shall be the issue of antecedent life." And Mr. Huxley also admitted, "The doctrine that life can only come from life is victorious all along the line." Prof. Conn states, "There is not the slightest evidence that living matter could arise from non-living matter. Spontaneous generation is universally given up." (_Evolution of To-day_, p. 26.) Wilson, the great authority on the cell says, "The study of the cell has seemed to expand rather than narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world." (_The Cell in Development and Inheritance_, p. 330.) Here then, is the greatest chasm of all: Evolution fails at the very start in the story of life. Yet this is its chosen field. On this depends the whole theory. If there was a Creator at the origin of life, why not at the origin of all living things? It is simply a question of degree. The making of a single cell, the simplest creature that lives, is as great a mystery as that of man. Conceptually the one is as possible as the other.[1] [1] See these points discussed more fully in Wright's Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences. CHAPTER III. THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIES.