[ zاى ] no scientific room for the suggestion that there is a mysterious factor differentiating living matter from other matter and life from other activities. We have to scale the walls, open the windows and explore the castle before crying out that it is so marvellous that it must contain ghosts. As may be supposed, theories of the origin of life apart from doctrines of special creation or of a primitive and slow spontaneous generation are mere fantastic speculations. The most striking of these suggests an extra-terrestrial origin. H. E. Richter appears to have been the first to propound the idea that life came to this planet as cosmic dust or in meteorites thrown off from stars and planets. Towards the end of the 19th century Lord Kelvin (then Sir W Thompson) and H. Von Helmholtz independently raised and discussed the possibility of such a origin of terrestrial life, laying stress on the presence of hydro-carbons in meteoric stones and on the indications of their presence revealed by the spectra of the tails of comets. W. Preyer has criticized such views, grouping them under phrase “Theory of cosmozoa" and hss suggested that living matter preceded inorganic matter. Preyer's view, however, enlarges the conception of life until it can be applied to the phenomena of
