THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3158, 8 April 1909, Page 7

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

There is one difficulty, remarks the London "Times," in an article on the cententry ni Darwin, which neither the evolutionist n»r the unscientific man has been able to overcome. That difficulty is the unbridged gap between living and non-living matter which at present divides the evolutionary process into two disconnected The physicist will establish the process from a mass of incandescent gas to the globe approximately as we know it, apart from life of any kind. The biologist is content to start with life of any kind, however humble, and to revolve from it the immense var--1 ety of highly complicated organisms around us. But in neither of these august "evolutionary processions do we find any explanation of the evolution of the living from the nonliving. This abrupt interference with continuity is very generally ignored. It is conveniently assumed that we can proceed with our speculations about the evolution of species with out regard to the origin of life. Yet a little raflection will show this notion to be untenable. For if life was once brought into beiong by a special art of creation, cadit questio. We nave no erojnds for limiting such an act to the creation of one very low form of life, to be aiterwards developed by excessively tedious processes. If, on the other hand, matter contains within itself properties or forces which in certain conditions can produce life, it is highly unreasonable to suppose that these conditions existed only once, at one particular time and place, and that the result was only one simple liv ng form. We must, on the contrary, suppose that life was evolved over a wide . area, and in many forms corresponding more or less to the great differences we know to exist between different forms of nonliving matter. It must be obvious, therefore, that we are upon very unsafe ground when we speculate upon the manner in which organic , evolution has proceeded without I knowing in the least what was the variable organic basis from which the whole process started. In particular W6 may be entirely on the wrong track, and may be wasting our time and energy, when we try to account for the organic world on the assumption that it proceeds from one form of living matter which we regard ss simple. If life arose through the operation of forces implicit in the ancestral nebula, it i was probably as various in its forms and potentialities as the other results of evolution immediately preceding it, which are revealed to jus by the geologist and the chemist. So long as this tremend ous hiatus exists in the evolutionay series—so long, that is to say, as we remain unable to explain or even 1 to conceive how the latest form of \ nonliving matter gave brith to the first form of lu'e —we may indeed, if so disposed, deny the possibility of a special art of creation, but v\e must at the same time admit, if we are honest with ourselves, that we have come to a deadlock. Biological evolution is all in the air, because the beginning of life is not given by inorganic evolution, and we reject the only alternative.