abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for censure. There must have been something in my particular mode of crossing it which provoked this tremendous "chorus of dissent."
Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel, and as it is held by the best scientific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun and planets were once diffused through space as an impalpable haze, out of which, by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets? That which rounds a tear—molecular force. For æons, the immensity of which overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. They are not formed of matter different from that of the earth around them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. How were they introduced? Was life implicated in the nebulæ—as part, it may be, of a vaster and wholly Incomprehensible Life; or is it the work of a Being standing: outside the nebulae, who fashioned it as a potter does his clay, but whose own origin and ways are equally past finding out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through Nature, no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of phenomena has ever been observed. The assumption of such a power to account for special phenomena has always proved a failure. It is opposed to the very spirit of science, and I therefore assumed the responsibility of holding up in contrast with it that method of Nature which it has been the vocation and triumph of science to disclose, and in the application of which we can alone hope for further light. Holding, then, that the nebulæ and all subsequent life stand to each other in the relation of the germ to the finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or defiantly, but without a shade of indistinctness, the position laid down in Belfast.
Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the definiteness belonging to the understanding, the scientific man has to put to himself these questions regarding the introduction of life upon the earth. He will be the last to dogmatize upon the subject, for he knows best that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, if not forever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the source of manifold confusion upon earth. With a mind open to conviction, he asks his opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like potter's clay; its
