ed at, but it must not
occur again. "It is enough," he writes, "that a single particle of
living protoplasm should once have appeared on the globe as the result of
no matter what agency. In the eyes of a consistent [!] evolutionist any
further [!] independent formation of protoplasm would be sheer waste"--and
the sooner the Almighty gets to understand that He must not make that
single act of special creation into a precedent the better for Him.

Professor Huxley, in fact, excuses the single case of spontaneous
generation which he appears to admit, because however illegitimate, it
was still "only a very little one," and came off a long time ago in a
foreign country. For my own part I think it will prove in the end more
convenient if we say that there is a low kind of livingness in every atom
of matter, and adopt Life eternal as no less inevitable a conclusion than
matter eternal.

It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration or motion there
is life and memory, and that there is vibration and motion at all times
in all things. The reader who takes the above position will find that he
can explain the entry of what he calls death among what he calls the
living, whereas he could by no means introduce life into his system if he
started without it. Death is deducible; life is not deducible. Death is
a change of memories; it is not the destruction of all memory. It is as
the liquidation of one company each member of which will presently join a
new one, and retain a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of
greater aptitude for working in concert with other molecules. This is
why animals feed on grass and on each other, and cannot proselytise or
convert the rude ground before it has been tutored in the first
principles of the higher kinds of association.

Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of believing anything in
this book unless he either likes it, or feels angry at being told it. If
required belief in this or that makes a man angry, I suppose he should,
as a general rule, swallow it whole then and there upon the spot,
otherwise he may take it or leave it as he likes.

I have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them; all on which I
rest are as open to the reader as to me. If I have sometimes used hard
terms, the probability is that I have not understood them, but have done
so by a slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company he has
been lately keeping. They sho