The Daily News. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1912. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 126, 15 October 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1912. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.

Nobody lias yet been able to solve for us the now historical query as to who was the gentleman "when Adam delved and Eve span," though there is strong presumptive evidence that it was not Eve. But science is not satisfied with these domestic origins, and, ignoring the possibilities of Adam's first wife, Litith, it likes to delve into deeper mysteries. There are hosts of good people who are prepared to accept the Darwinian theory, even in the absence of the missing link, and to believe that our earliest forefathers were a nut-eating race that swung by their tails in the highest treetops and scoffed at the serpent and all other inhabitants of the Garden of Eden. Xot content with this, we were all startled a few weeks ago by the receipt of a cablegram which frankly stated that Professor E. A. Schafer had solved the eternal mystery and had proved before the British Medical Association that man was purely a mechanical production. His address, according to the latest files of English newspapers, has given rise to a discussion among the experts that is a trifle confusing to the layman. As a matter of fact, Science has, apparently, not yet provided a plain answer to the problem that the Professor has sought to .elucidate, and the men who are trying to interpret her ambiguous hints find opportunities for wide divergence of opinion. But there is one fact that can be gripped at once by ordinary people, and that is that the pure materialism of jHacckel was not endorsed in the cablegrams that reached us. The full reports of the address show that Professor Schafer did not contend, as the cabled summary suggested, that man was the product of a purely mechanical process. He said that the old definitions which separated animate nature from the inanimate had proved to be worthless. The scientist found himself unable to say where the scale of life began, since he found that "dead" substances, even chemical combinations of his own making, bad the movements and some of the properties of the very low forms of living things. He was forced towards the belief that the evolution which had produced living creatures from the protoplasm was operating in inorganic substances. The origin of life was due to a gradual and continual process of change from material which was lifeless, through material which was on the borderland between inanimate and animate, to material possessing 'Jie characteristics that arc described by the term "life." But, having said this much, Professor Senator confessed that he saw something in man that could not be explained by the evolution theory. He made it very clear that his remarks about 'life" were not intended to apply to the conception to which the word "soul" is attached. The distinction between the two parts of man would have to be maintained strictly if a true view of the position was tobe obtained. It is obvious, of course,

that even if there is no fixed barrier between the dead rock and the living man, the mystery of man's "whence" and his "whither" still remains unexplained as far as science as concerned. Professor' Sehafer has recognised this fact, though, like most of liia scientific brethren, he tends to disregard the psychical attri-. butes of life in favor of the material factors. He leaves religion to solve the problem in its own way, but lie still leaves it with a very strong case for our accepted belief in the Creation.