Sir W. Thomson believes in evolution as a zoological truth,
though not as a biological truth, and he startled Edinburgh by one of the wildest fancies we ever remember to have read. Life, he says, can only come from life—which is true, and is the best argument we know of for a living Creator—but life might have been born on this earth through the fall of a moss-covered aerolite from some shattered planet, which might oven have on it some living animal. The idea of anything living after it had been hurled through air- less space and through our buckler of atmosphere is certainly dreamy enough for science. There is not an atom of evidence for it, there is nothing gained by it—for how did life come in the shattered world 7—and it is utterly inconsistent with what we take to be nearly proved, that no planet has, or can have, precisely the -atmosphere of ours. How, then, could the moss bred there live here, any more than noses on Mount Everest ?
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