bitations of beings like unto
ourselves.

The trend of modern discovery has been against carrying this view to
its extreme, as will be presently shown. Before considering the
difficulties in the way of accepting it to the widest extent, let us
enter upon some preliminary considerations as to the origin and
prevalence of life, so far as we have any sound basis to go upon.

A generation ago the origin of life upon our planet was one of the
great mysteries of science. All the facts brought out by investigation
into the past history of our earth seemed to show, with hardly the
possibility of a doubt, that there was a time when it was a fiery mass,
no more capable of serving as the abode of a living being than the
interior of a Bessemer steel furnace. There must therefore have been,
within a certain period, a beginning of life upon its surface. But, so
far as investigation had gone--indeed, so far as it has gone to the
present time--no life has been found to originate of itself. The living
germ seems to be necessary to the beginning of any living form. Whence,
then, came the first germ? Many of our readers may remember a
suggestion by Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, made twenty or
thirty years ago, that life may have been brought to our planet by the
falling of a meteor from space. This does not, however, solve the
difficulty--indeed, it would only make it greater. It still leaves open
the question how life began on the meteor; and granting this, why it
was not destroyed by the heat generated as the meteor passed through
the air. The popular view that life began through a special act of
creative power seemed to be almost forced upon man by the failure of
science to discover any other beginning for it. It cannot be said that
even to-day anything definite has been actually discovered to refute
this view. All we can say about it is that it does not run in with the
general views of modern science as to the beginning of things, and that
those who refuse to accept it must hold that, under certain conditions
which prevail, life begins by a very gradual process, similar to that
by which forms suggesting growth seem to originate even under
conditions so unfavorable as those existing in a bottle of acid.

But it is not at all necessary for our purpose to decide this question.
If life existed through a creative act, it is absurd to suppose that
that act was confined to one of the countless millions of worlds
scattered through