Appendix: Note XVIL 495
ining that It was ever more fitted than at present for originating life?
The attempt to explain life by Protoplasm is generally acknowledged to have failed. The reader will find materials for forming a judgment on the controversy in Prof. Huxley's s Physical Basis of Life/ in Dr Lionel Scale's % Protoplasm,1 and Dr Hutchison Stirling's 'Concerning Protoplasm/ The Rev. Joseph Cook, in several of his second series of Boston Monday Lectures, presents Dr Lionel Beale's results in a very popular and effective manner, I regret to perceive, however, that he and others should accept so readily Dr Lionel's view that the body is divisible into dead and living matter, the latter being a comparatively small portion, which becomes red under the application of carmine. I confess 1 fail to see that his division will hold, and believe that every kind of matter — Beale's so-called living matter included —will ultimately be analysed into inorganic elements.
The world-renowned Bathybius of Huxley, Haeckel, and Strauss, has turned out to be "a sea-mare's nest." The explorations of the Challenger have shown that the supposed "vast sheet of living matter enveloping the whole earth beneath its seas" is little more than a deposit of gypsum. Huxley, with characteristic candour, hastened, as soon as the results of these explorations were communicated to him, to acknowledge his mistake. Even Haeckel no longer argues that the existence of 1 lathy bius is proved, but ventures only to maintain that its non-existence is not proved.
Were this note not already too long, I should have submitted Haeckel's views concerning the origin of life to a special examination. It may be necessary to state,