[Footnote 1:  Professor Allman.]

Now it is claimed that such a little organism contains the potentiality of all life; that it grows and multiplies, and develops into higher and higher organisms, into all (in short) that we see in the plant and animal world around us.  This, it is argued, is all done by natural causes, not by any direction or guidance or intervention of a Divine agency.

Here we must stop to ask how this protoplasm, or simplest form of organic life, came to exist?  How did it get its life—­its property of taking nourishment, of growing and of giving birth to other creatures like itself?

The denier of creation replies, that just in the same way as, by the laws of affinity, other inanimate substances came together to produce the earth—­salts and other compounds we see in the world around us—­so did certain elements combine to form protoplasm.  This combination when perfected has the property of being alive, just as water has the property of assuming a solid form or has any other of the qualities which we speak of as its properties.

Now it is perfectly true that, treated as a substance, you can take the gummy protoplasm, put it into a glass and subject it to analysis like any other substance.  But simple as the substance appears, composition is really very complicated.  Professor Allman tells us that so difficult and wonderful is its chemistry, that in fact really very little is known about it.  The best evidence we have, I believe, makes it tolerably certain that protoplasm consists of a combination of ammonia, carbonic acid, and water, and that every molecule of it is made up of 76 atoms, of which 36 are carbon, 26 hydrogen, 4 nitrogen, and 10 oxygen.[1]

But no chemist has ever been able either to account theoretically for such a composition, still less to produce it artificially.  It is urged, however, that it may be only due to our clumsy apparatus and still very imperfect knowledge of chemistry, that we were unable artificially to make up protoplasm.

[Footnote 1:  Nicholson ("Zoology,” p. 4) gives for Albumen, which is nearly identical with protoplasm—­Carbon, 144; Hydrogen, 110; Nitrogen, 18; Oxygen, 42; Sulphur, 2.  These figures nearly equal those in the text, being those figures multiplied each by 4 (approximately) and without the trace of sulphur.]

And of course there is no answer to a supposition of this sort.  Nevertheless there is no sort of reason to believe that protoplasm will ever be made; nor, if we could succeed in uniting the elements into a form resembling protoplasmic jelly, is there the least reason to suppose that such a composition would exhibit the irritability, or the powers of nutrition and reproduction, which are essentially the characteristics of living protoplasm.  It is not too much to say that, after the close of the controversy about spontaneous generation, it is now a universally admitted principle of science that life can only proceed from life—­the old omne vivum ex ovo in a modern form.[1]