Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/11



E may introduce this great subject by putting to ourselves four leading questions: first, is life something new; second, is life evolution the same as stellar evolution; third, is there evidence that similar physico-chemical laws prevail in life and in lifeless evolution; fourth, are life forms the result of law or of chance?

First: does the origin of life represent the beginning of something new in the cosmos, or does it represent the continuation and evolution of forms of matter and energy already found in the earth, in the sun, and in the other stars? This is the first question which occurs to us, and it is one which has not yet been answered. The more traditional opinion is that something new entered this and possibly other planets with the appearance of life; this is also involved in all the older and newer hypotheses which group around the idea of vitalism or the existence of specific, distinctive and adaptive energies in living matter. The more modern scientific opinion is that life arose from a recombination of forces preexisting in the cosmos. To hold to this answer, that life does not represent the entrance either of a new form of matter or of a new series of laws but is simply another step in the general evolutionary process, is certainly consistent with the development of me-