once; doubtless it will be under the sea again in the future. Look into that future; look into that past. Can you measure either of those intervals in the years of common chronology? Yet all over the world the succession of geological strata proclaims the recurrence over and over again of such intervals; silent, indeed, as to positive evidence, but widening the possible limits of time's duration to the furthest stretch of fancy.

All our great continents have been ever so many times, either in the mass or piecemeal, under the waves of the ocean. Nothing hinders that the bed of every great ocean should have been ever so many times turned into dry land. This interchange is going on now in numberless regions of sea and land. All the facts as we find them are such as they might be expected to be had this interchange been going on, as no doubt it has been, through an indefinite past. We are bound to allow millions of years for the formation of the strata that have been already examined. There may be depths below the lowest depths yet explored by geologists ; there have certainly been immense intervals which have left no materials for the geologist to explore; and when all the profoundest deep of stratification shall have been explored, we may still find that the record of all these unnumbered millions of years is but, as it were, the latest page of the volume-a page that may have been preceded by a thousand others now almost irrevocably lost or become utterly illegible. There is nothing to hinder the supposition that those earlier pages, if they existed, were, amidst innumerable differences, still in

their general aspect very like the latest, as long or longer, as full of the memorials of eventful circumstance, of constant change dominated by and springing from the operation of unchanging laws. As the time is absolutely incalculable which the theory of evolution requires to account for the highest forms of life upon the earth, so the time which all these considerations leave open for the work is absolutely beyond calculation. The theory cannot ask for more than the facts make it possible to offer.

We hear men sometimes dwell on an expression which they fancy to be Scriptural, that there should be time no longer1;' as if time by any possibility could ever come to an end! It is a pity that they should completely misinterpret the passage on which their opinion fancies itself to be grounded. It is a still greater pity that they should use the language of rational human beings, without being at the pains to determine whether their words have any intelligible meaning: for certainly to the human mind any beginning or end of time is wholly inconceivable. Language itself will not bear with the conception, unless it be consistent to speak of a time when time was not, of a time when time will be no more.

There is a poem, and a sweet one, by the present Poet-Laureate, in which the murmuring brook is made to speak the language of the moralist, and to proclaim the transitory nature of all human affairs, by a com

1 Revelation x. 6, Authorised Version.

parison between the short duration of man's life and its own unceasing current

Such is the proud language of the murmuring brook. Yet the boast is an untrue one; for if any conclusion in regard to the future can be warranted from the facts of the past, none can be more sure than that no particular brook will flow on for ever. Instead of a brook, it may become a mighty river like the St. Lawrence; it may dash over precipitous cliffs with a vaster fall and volume than Niagara; and, after all, the slow inexorable changes of the earth's crust will one day make its flow impossible, and the channel of it shall know its stream no more. Only the flow of time is unending, of time which does nothing, but out of or without which nothing can be done, of time, replete with glorious wonders as far back as the knowledge or the imagination of man can penetrate, through every age, through every million of years that can be rescued from forgetfulness, bearing fresh testimony, in the greatness and the endlessness of the work, to the eternal power and wisdom of the Supreme Worker.

NOTE ON THE HYPOTHESIS

OF

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.

PRESUMING that there is not a particle of evidence as yet established in favour of the supposition known as the doctrine of abiogenesis, it does not follow that no such evidence ever will, or ever can, be forthcoming. The advancement of science is continually doing away with harsh, abrupt outlines, and revealing the softest shades of transition in the varied scenery of nature. Between organic and inorganic matter, between the inert and the living mass, the line of separation has been hitherto, to our minds, the hardest and sharpest of all. We have indeed become so accustomed to this violation of the cosmos, this harsh interruption to the continuous order of nature, and to the simplicity of its general plan, that we are apt to be rather annoyed than pleased with the first efforts made to prove them only imaginary. There is a dignity about life which requires, it is thought, to be defended from too close a proximity in character to the chemical solids and liquids amongst

which it makes its appearance, even though the life whose dignity is thus maintained exhibit little more than the functions of a stomach, or be presented in the somewhat dull animation of a chrysalis and the torpor of a slug.

A Wellingtonia gigantea, with its stupendous height and graceful form, with its bark and wood, and sap and pith, and cones and innumerable spikelets, seems wonderfully noble and vastly superior in the scale of creation to a spoonful of salt; yet every one of the tiny grains has, so far as we know, full as much sense and as much power of enjoyment as the stately tree. The mineral and the vegetable are, in fact, alike destitute of any qualities on which a comparison of dignity can properly be founded. The organic depends ultimately upon the inorganic for its nutriment. It is itself ultimately reduced to the inorganic. It does not, therefore, seem incredible that living organisms, simpler perhaps than any yet detected by the microscope, should be or should have been produced without generation proper by the mere combining of inorganic materials.

This is the hypothesis of Spontaneous Generation, so called, or abiogenesis, unproved and extremely difficult of proof, but precisely filling that gap in the order and continuity of nature which is so puzzling without it.

Practically it makes no difference to the theory of development whether the simple organisms from which that theory supposes the more complicated to be derived, originated at a single era or at several. The theory does not deny the perpetuation throughout vast