‘But the planetary orbits turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand as was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton had to come after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of “The Origin of Species” an immense debt of gratitude.’ 176. We will defer to our last chapter some further remarks on Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis. Meanwhile, before concluding, let us briefly allude to the original production of living things on our globe. It may, perhaps, eventually be possible by means of a hypothesis of evolution, to account for the great variety of living forms on the supposition of a single primordial germ to begin with; but the difficulty still remains how to account for this germ. It is against all true scientific experience that life can appear without the intervention of a living antecedent. How then are we to explain the production of the primordial germ? The difficulty of doing so from our point of view would appear to be unusually great, for we have come to the conclusion that, as a matter of scientific principle, we cannot admit any such breach of continuity as a pure act of creation in time would imply. If, then, a pure act of creation in time be an inadmissible hypothesis, and if the hypothesis of Abiogenesis be equally inadmissible, our readers may well ask how are we to surmount the difficulty. For our reply to this question, we must once more beg to refer them to our concluding chapter. CHAPTER VI. SPECULATIONS AS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCES TN THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them.’—SHAKESPEARE, _Macbeth_. 177. Our readers are now aware from what we have said in Chapter II. that the two great requisites for organised existence are, in the first place, an organ of memory, giving the individual a hold upon the past, and secondly, the possibility of varied action in the present, and that unless these two things are fulfilled life is simply inconceivable.