Again, said Lord Salisbury, how inscrutable is the ether. For
a long time the ether had merely furnished "a nominative case to the verb to undulate," and, except as a medium for undulations, nothing was known of it. Once more, how wholly inscrutable is "life." Lord Salisbury dwelt with a fine enthusiasm on the genius of Darwin, and the confutation he had given to the old idea of the immutability of species ; but Darwin had done nothing to solve the enigma of the origin of life, and apparently the mathematicians had shown that there could have been no life on the earth long enough ago to have given time for the vast number of differentiations of life which have arisen here since the first jelly-fish had appeared upon our planet ; the geologists and biologists had "positively revelled in the prodigality of the ciphers which they have put at the end of the earth's hypothetical life," but the mathematicians have shown that if all their ciphers are legitimate, life must have begun on the earth when it was far too hot even for a jelly-fish. On Weismann's acquiescence in the agency of natural selection, not because he could under- stand or even 'imagine its procedure in accounting for the various kinds of life we see, but because, if that is out of the question, recourse must be had to purpose and design, Lord Salisbury dwelt with a happy irony all his own. Creative design, once the fundamental assumption of every philosopher, is now the rectuctio ad absurdum of the reigning school of scientific thought.
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