Life: Its True Genesis by R. W. Wright

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[17]: These, while presenting the most varied and diverse forms of
infusorial life, are nevertheless the most constant and abundant
type. They abound more or less in all organic infusions. Ehrenberg,
however, holds that they are no more animal than vegetal forms. They
vary in length from 1/15000 to 1/2000 of an inch, and are
consequently too minute to be satisfactorily classified in respect
to all their diversified characteristics.

[18]: The extent of the southern ice-cap may at least be approximately
reached from explorations already made. Capt. Weddell, in 1823,
extended his explorations southward to within about 15A deg. of the
south pole, where he found an open sea. Capt. Ross, in 1842,
approached to within about 13A deg. of the same pole, without serious
obstruction. It is true that, in the following year, he encountered
ice barriers near the line of the antarctic circle, but they were
floating barriers coming down from Weddell's open sea. Capt.
Wilkes, in 1840, explored a considerable portion of the Antarctic
Continent, lying almost entirely within the antarctic circle. Other
explorations have been made, showing that the southern ice-cap does
not probably extend, continuously at least, much farther north than
78A deg. or 80A deg., or to within some ten or twelve degrees of the south
pole, independently of the packs of drifting ice in the otherwise
open seas.

[19]: The truth or falsity of "Evolution" depends entirely on the
successful solution of this problem, for the chances are
quintillions to ones that no two identical forms could have
originated from different centres, or from the same centre on
divergent lines, and ever reached identically the same results. And
how any two forms should happen to be sexually paired, on the same
or different lines of divergence, is one of those inexplicable
mysteries which must puzzle Herbert Spencer in all his labyrinthian
searches into "Force-correlation," "Differentiation," "the Dynamic
Force of Molecules," etc., etc. However successful he may be in
other directions, he will inevitably fail in this. We must fall back
on the grand Old Bible genesis for the solution of this difficulty,
where every living thing was commanded to produce seed, or multiply
and replenish the waters and the earth with offspring.

[20]: These transcendental or ideal forms may be said to correspond to the
"spiritual essences" of Plato. They are the eternal, immutable
principles which are discernible to the eye of the soul, as the
sensible objects they represent are discernible to the eye of the
body. Modern metaphysics may deem them mere abstractions, but a
higher realistic philosophy will treat them as substantive forms, of
which the objective reality is but the shadow.

[21]: Herbert Spencer may be quoted as authority on this point. He says:
"There is invariably, and necessarily, a conformity between the
vital functions of any organism, and the _conditions_ in which it is
placed ... We find that every animal is limited to a certain range
of climate; every plant to certain zones of latitude and elevation."
And the same law holds good as to the marine fauna and flora, each
specific form being confined to its own sea-depth, or distance north
or south from the thermal equator.

[22]: Speaking of the ultimate principles or elements of matter, Plato is
quoted by Humboldt as exclaiming with modest diffidence, "God alone,
and those whom he loves among men, know what they are." It is only
those who seek to eliminate God from the universe that speak with
confident flippancy on the subject of molecular machinery and
force-correlations.

[23]: As long as the evolutionists cannot agree among themselves as to
what constitutes the process of evolution, it can hardly be expected
that the public will accept their speculations as conclusive
inductions. Professor Bastian, who strongly commits himself to the
doctrine, thinks the word "evolution" arbitrary and open to many
objections, while Mr. Herbert Spencer says;--"The antithetical word
Involution would much more truly express the nature of the process."

[24]: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of
God dwelleth in you?" 1 Cor. 3. xvi.

[25]: Dr. Drysdale, in his work on the "Protoplasmic Theory of Life,"
says: "Matter cannot change its state of motion or rest without the
influence of some force from without. True spontaneity of movement
is, therefore, just as impossible to it as to what we call dead
matter.... So we are compelled to admit the existence of an exciting
cause in the form of some force from without to give the initial
impulse in all vital actions." In all life-manifestations, this
"force from without," must be a pre-existing vital principle
operating to effect the otherwise impossible change in matter.

[26]: A favorite set-phrase of Professor Bastian in speaking of
morphological cells or "units," as he sometimes calls them.

[27]: That great and justly celebrated naturalist, Buffon, in speaking of
the universal origination of the lower forms of animal life by a
process termed, in his time, "spontaneous generation," says: "There
are, perhaps, as many living things, both animal and vegetable,
which are produced by the fortuitous aggregations of 'molA(C)cules
organiques,' as there are others which reproduce themselves by a
constant succession of generations." It is said that Buffon was for
some time associated with the AbbA(C) Needham in his experiments in
vital directions, and was much influenced by them. So that it is by
no means certain that he did not accept the AbbA(C)'s "force
vA(C)gA(C)tative" in place of his more materialistic views respecting
"molA(C)cules organiques." At all events, his statement that as many
living things appear in nature independently of reproducing causes
as by successive generation, is no doubt true.

[28]: M. TrA(C)viranus, who followed Spallanzani and M. Bonnet in these flask
experimentations, first noticed the important fact that the
animalculA| appearing in different organic infusions, depended on
the nature and quality of the infusions themselves, and that the
changed conditions of the same infusion produced new and independent
forms of life.

[29]: Leibnitz, as quoted by M. Bonnet, says:--"Que l'Entendement Divin
A(C)toit la religion A(C)ternelle des Essences; parce que tout ce qui
existe existoit comme de toute A(C)ternitA(C) comme possible ou en idA(C)e
dans l'entendement de Dieu. J'exprimerai cette vA(C)ritA(C) sublime en
d'autres termes: le plan entier d'univers existoit de toute EternitA(C)
dans l'entendement du SuprAme Architecte. Tou tes les parties de
l'univers et jusqu' an moindre atome A(C)toient deffinA(C)s dans ce plan.
Tous les changemens qui devoient survenir aux diffA(C)rentes pieces de
ce Tout immense y avoient aussi leurs reprA(C)sentations. Chaque etre y
A(C)toit figurA(C) par ses characteres propres: et l'acte par lequel la
Souveraine Puissance a rA(C)alisA(C) ce plan, est ce que nous nommons la
CrA(C)ation."

[30]: Here is a fact given us by Dr. F. Hall, of Wallingford, Conn.: In a
peat meadow in that town, owned by him, which was at no time subject
to overflow, a large quantity of peat had been removed at different
intervals of time, when the excavations naturally filled with water.
In these excavations there appeared not only the _Cyprinidae_ in
considerable numbers, but fresh water clams which grew to be as
large as those in the most favored streams. They made their
appearance the very first season after the peat was removed, and
have flourished there ever since. In no other portions of the meadow
were there any fish or clams ever noticed before, nor was there any
other source of water-supply than the rain-falls in that locality.

[31]: Professor Beale, in one of his very latest works says: "Of the
chemical and physical forms of energy something is known, but of
the relationship of the so called _vital_ energy, nothing has
been proved. We only know that the influence it exerts is
altogether different from that which has been traced to physical
and chemical energy."

[32]: It is admitted, even in the case of _Bacteria_, whose movements are
the most uniform, that they are sometimes so inert and languid as to
show no movements at all; while, at other times, they exhibit mere
Brownian movements or those no more nearly allied to "life" than the
minute particles of carbon escaping from the flame of a kerosene
lamp. And among the most distinguished microscopists, it is a
question whether these infusorial forms, those exhibiting the most
active oscillations, are really vegetal or animal in origin; in
other words, whether they are _Fungus-spores_ or _Torula_-cells, or
whether they may not be some intermediate forms.

[33]: The difficulty of assigning any definitional value to a "primordial
germ" is due to the vagueness of idea attached to it in the popular
mind, as well as to the diversified theories and speculations of the
scientists concerning the origin of life. We can only define it as a
"vital unit," as the chemist defines his smallest conceivable
quantity--his "primary least"--of an element, as a "chemical unit."

[34]: Let two comrades be shot at the same instant in battle, the one
through the heart, and the other through the arm, shattering it
badly. What is there to prevent the surgeon from taking a piece of
bone out of the arm of the man shot through the heart and instantly
killed, and using it to make good the arm of the man still living?
Apparently nothing but that the dead man's bone will not knit. He
may not have been dead five minutes, and Professor Beale's bioplasts
might still be at work spinning matter and weaving tissue for the
integrity of the displaced bone. Why will it not knit? Simply
because the vital principle that differentiates matter is gone--can
no longer act. If the integrity of the bone depended on the action
of the molecules, and not on the vital principle, there is no reason
why this experiment should not be a success. For the molecules are
all there, and their action will not be disturbed for hours after
the death of the man shot through the heart.

[35]: It is safe to adhere to the Leibnitzian axiom, _Natura non agit
saltatim_.

[36]: One of the most cultured classes of Christian believers in our day,
holds that "all life is from the Lord;" that "He is the fountain,
and we only the streams thence." And this, they claim, is true of
all life. To "take away our breath," therefore, is to cut off this
stream perpetually flowing from its invisible source--the fountain
of all Life. When scientific methods substitute for a first cause a
mere resultant effect, all primary principles disappear in their
intermediates.

[37]: Professor Marsh, of Yale College, has predicted that the "missing
link" will be found in Borneo--evidently not crediting Mr. Stanley's
statement about its presence in the interior of Africa. But one
"missing link" is hardly enough; there ought to be an extensive
family of them to complete Mr. Darwin's plexus. From the lowest
genetic form to the anthropoid ape is a distance which does not half
cover the length of this plexus--the immense gap between the monkey
and the man being decidedly the greater length of chain. And yet the
first half of the chain is traversed by innumerable forms--millions
of links, so to speak. How, then, is the greater length of the
plexus to be covered by a single "missing link?" A long line of
caudal ancestry must be dug up, therefore, in Borneo, and shipped to
the Peabody Museum, before this tremendous stretch in the chain of
animated nature is satisfactorily accounted for. Borneo must be
exceedingly rich in osteologic remains, even to bridge the chasm
between its own ourang-outangs and the Dyaks, or aboriginal
inhabitants, of that island.

[38]: This daring hypothesis of the materialists is so utterly repugnant
to all our ideas of a perfected Cosmos, that we have no patience
with those advancing it. It is, at best, speculation run mad, and is
based on no other assumption than that of the inherent
imperfectibility of the universe as it came from the hand of God, or
from the dynamic play of molecules extending throughout vast
geognostic epochs.

From a materialistic stand-point this assumption of imperfectibility
inevitably runs into the _reductio ad absurdum_. For if, in the play
of the material forces of the universe, an infinite duration of past
time has effected nothing but mutually disturbing and re-adjusting
movements and relations among cosmical bodies, then an infinite
duration of time to come can effect nothing but similarly mutual
adjustments and re-adjustments in respect to such bodies. With an
infinity of time, space, matter and motion, everywhere presenting a
unity of phenomena in the universe, "there can never be anything,"
according to the great Stagirite, "unconnected or out of place, as
in a bad tragedy." Conservation must, therefore, be the rule, and
desinence the impossible exception.

But these adherents of inherent imperfectibility instance the fact
of vanished and variable stars, as well as those that have suddenly
appeared, and, after brief periods of intense brilliancy, as
suddenly disappeared, to show that there are mighty disturbances in
the sidereal heavens which entirely negative the idea of
"conservation" as a geognostic law. But the phenomena of variable
stars, with all their apparent irregularity of motion and
fluctuations in luminosity, are now being traced to definite and
well-determined laws of motion, if not of light, while the theory of
extinguished and disappearing stars belongs exclusive to the age of
Tycho Brahe. Where there is one self-luminious body (or sun) in the
interstellary spaces, there are probably not less than forty
non-luminous or dark cosmical bodies revolving about their
respective centres of light and heat, as the attending planets
revolve about the common centre of gravity in our own system. And
this is especially true of that vast and fathomless star-stratum,
called the Milky-way, in which most of these peculiar phenomena
occur, with the exception of the variable stars only.

That stars should vary in their intensity of light by the probable
transits of these dark cosmical bodies across their discs, is no
matter of wonder or astonishment: on the contrary, it is surprising
that these sidereal phenomena do not occur with much greater
frequency. This would inevitably be the case if the planes of
revolution, in the case of these non-luminous bodies about their
central orbs, were coincident with the lines of vision from our own
planet--a circumstance by no means improbable from the vastness of
the sidereal heavens and the innumerable hosts of stars marching
therein. Besides, these periodical variations may be accounted for
in part--especially in the case of double stars--from their apparent
rather than real change of place in the heavens. For if our
sun-system is travelling towards a point in the constellation
Hercules at the rate of 194 thousand miles an hour (the rapidity of
Arcturus' flight), it is impossible to determine, in the present
state of astronomical knowledge, whether the apparent change of
place in any star is real or merely optical. But, in the case of
double stars, each is travelling (independently of its other
motions) about the common centre of gravity obtaining in its own
system, and these relative movements may account for the greater or
less intensity of light as the two stars, viewed as one, present a
greater or less area of luminosity in their united surfaces.

The assumed revolution of one of these stars about the other--thus
destroying all the known analogies of the universe, as exemplified
in our own system--may be accounted for in the same way. With
stupendous planetary systems revolving about each of these
apparently double stars, they must respectively have a revolution,
real as well as apparent, about their own centres of gravity--not
one and the same centre, but different and far distant centres.
Lying in nearly the same line of vision, with planes of movement at
right angles with it, they would necessarily present the appearance
of one star revolving about the other--an _apparent_ motion only.

And the writer here ventures an explanation of the phenomena of
_temporary_ stars, or those making their appearance in the heavens,
flaming up into stars of the first, second and third magnitudes, and
then disappearing altogether. The most remarkable of these stars, or
_apparent_ stars, was that of Tycho Brahe in 1572, presenting its
maximum brilliancy at the very first, but gradually diminishing in
size until the end of seventeen months, when it disappeared, without
change of place, from the heavens. This temporary star was visible
in Cassiopeia, on the verge of the Milky-way, within whose swarm of
stellar worlds most of these apparent stars have made their
appearance. Tycho Brahe, in seeking to account for this stellar
phenomenon, advanced the theory that stars might be "formed and
molded out of cosmical vapor," or "vapory celestial matter," as the
elder Herschel put it, "which becomes luminous as it condenses
(conglomerates) into fixed stars." But any such rapid condensation
of "vapory matter," in the light of Laplace's "nebular theory," is
manifestly too absurd for scientific recognition. A more
satisfactory explanation may be here suggested:--Supposing the
apparent relative position of any six or seven stars of the sixth
magnitude in the Milky-way, should be so changed by the combined
motions of our sun-system and of the stars themselves, as to throw
them into one and the same line of vision, but so clustered together
as to show their several star-discs as one, we should unquestionably
have a star of the first magnitude, which would continue as long as
this extraordinary stellar conjunction should last. As one after
another of these stars should fall out of line, by reason of the
combined motions named, the apparent star would be diminished from
the first to the second magnitude, and so on until it reached the
sixth magnitude, when it would pass beyond the reach of unaided
human vision. But as the star of Tycho Brahe suddenly appeared at
its fullest brilliancy, it may be objected that this suggested
theory fails to meet the required conditions.

As 18,000,000, out of the 20,000,000, of telescopic stars lie in the
Milky-way, it is not by any means improbable that such a conjunction
of stars may occur therein as often at least as once or twice in a
century. We certainly see brilliant patches of closely-crowded
stars, in great numbers, in this galactic zone, and the fact that
these temporary stars almost uniformly appear in that zone renders
the suggestion here made quite as rational, in the way of
speculation at least, as that of "vapory celestial matter" suddenly
condensed into a star of the first magnitude, as Sir. William
Herschel would have us believe was possible, if not probable.

Besides, it is a definitely ascertained fact that such clusters of
stars, lying in almost the same line of vision, exist in various
parts of the heavens, which present to the naked eye the appearance
of a star of the fourth or fifth magnitude, and probably would, if
more thickly clustered, present that of a star of the first
magnitude. But powerful telescopes resolve them into a large number
of stars, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth magnitude. One such
cluster in Andromeda's girdle has been resolved into not less than
fifteen hundred small stars of very low magnitude, and pretty widely
scattered in the telescopic field. Alexander Von Humboldt, in
speaking of stars that have thus disappeared, says that "their
disappearance may be the result of their motion as much as of any
diminution of their photometric processes (whether on their surfaces
or in their photospheres), as would render the waves of light too
weak too excite the organs of sight." And he adds: "What we no
longer see is not necessarily annihilation," repeating at the same
time the question of Pliny--"_StellA| an obirent nascerenturve?_"

But another, and (to our mind) more satisfactory, explanation of
these stellar phenomena, may be hazarded in this connection: There
are, for instance, in the Milky-way, among the more brilliant
clusters of stars, dark granular spots, of greater or less
magnitude, in which the most powerful telescopes show no glints or
traces of stars. They are among Humboldt's smaller "fissures or
chasms in the heavens," in which he asserts that there is a great
paucity of stars, or none at all. Now, if one of these thick stellar
clusters, which show to the naked eye as a single star, should, by
the combined cosmical movements of our sun-system and the stellar
group in question, pass into the field of one of these small rents
or "fissures" in the galactic curtain--that lying in front of the
stellar cluster--it would immediately show as a star of possibly the
first magnitude, and would continue to shine as a star of that
magnitude so long as it remained in the field of the narrow rent or
fissure. It would shine out suddenly like a star through a rift in
the clouds of a dark night, and disappear as soon as it had
traversed, or apparently traversed, the rift in question. This
galactic curtain, it should be borne in mind, is made up of
18,000,000 of stars, or sun-systems, and not less than 720,000,000
dark cosmical bodies revolving about their respective centres of
gravity. If the "nebular theory" of the universe be true, this is
unquestionably the exact condition of things in the Milky-way. Of
the more distant stars in this crowded galaxy, we can only catch,
even in the telescopic field, mere glints of light as the
intervening swarms of stellar and planetary worlds thicken in the
foreground and shut out the more distant view. It is only through
these rents and fissures in this great galactic curtain that the
brighter stellar clusters beyond can ever be seen; and these glints
of far distant light, showing dimly through this curtain, may
account for the peculiar _milky_ appearance of the galaxy, arising
from the loss of chromatic power in the full beams themselves. It
was undoubtedly through one of these rents in the galactic curtain
that the condensed starry cluster of Tycho Brahe suddenly made its
appearance in the outer fringes of the Milky-way, and remained
visible for a period of seventeen months.

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