Although the latter verdict may be a little dogmatic, it yet demonstrates how strongly many scientists feel the necessity of finding another way of solving the problem. The so-called theory of panspermia really shows a way. According to this theory life-giving seeds are drifting about in space. They encounter the planets, and fill their surfaces with life as soon as the necessary conditions for the existence of organic beings are established. This view was probably foreshadowed long ago. Definite suggestions in this direction we find in the writings of the Frenchman Sales-Guyon de Montlivault (1821), who assumed that seeds from the moon had awakened the first life on the surface of the earth. The German physician H. E. Richter attempted to supplement the doctrine of Darwin by combining the conception of panspermia with it. Flammarion’s book on the plurality of inhabited worlds suggested to Richter the idea that seeds had come from some other inhabited world to our earth. He emphasizes the fact that carbon has been found in meteorites which move in orbits similar to those of the comets which wander about in space; and in this carbon he sees the rests of organic life. There is no proof at all for this latter opinion. The carbon found in meteorites has never exhibited any trace of organic structure, and we may well imagine the carbon—_e.g._, that which appears to occur in the sun—to be of inorganic origin. Still more fantastic is his idea that organisms floating high in our atmosphere are caught by the attraction of meteorites flying past our planet, and are in this way carried out into universal space and deposited upon other celestial bodies. As the surface of meteorites becomes incandescent in their flight through the atmosphere, any germs which they might possibly have caught would be destroyed; and if, in spite of that, a meteorite should become the conveyor of live germs, those germs would be burned in the atmosphere of the planet on which they descended. In one point, however, we must agree with Richter. There is logic in his statement that “The infinite space is filled with, or (more correctly) contains, growing, mature, and dying celestial bodies. By mature worlds we understand those which are capable of sustaining organic life. We regard the existence of organic life in the universe as eternal. Life has always been there; it has always propagated itself in the shape of living organisms, from cells and from individuals composed of cells.” Man used to speculate on the origin of matter, but gave that up when experience taught him that matter is indestructible and can only be transformed. For similar reasons we never inquire into the origin of the energy of motion. And we may become accustomed to the idea that life is eternal, and hence that it is useless to inquire into its origin.