Excerpt from Protoplasm: Being the Presidential Address Delivered Before the Kendal Natural History Association, October 2nd, 1913

In recent times protoplasm is nowhere found but in the cells of animals and plants, and as all the organisms existing at the present day, arose from preceding organisms of the same or similar kinds, and they in their turn, generation after generation, from others that produced them and as all these, both recent and ancient, live or did live in an inorganic world of the same character from the earliest times till now, we are' justified in believing that this hasalways been the case since vegetables and animals first appeared upon the earth. But if, rejecting revelation as some do, we would ask how did the first organism, whether plant or animal, come into being, or how was protoplasm first formed, there is nothing in the world that we can question, and any opinion that we may form can be nothing else than speculation or an unprovable and therefore unprofitable theory. The only statement we can make that seems unshakably true is that, at that early time, the tempera ture of the earth's surface must have been much as it is at the present day, not above that at which protoplasm coagulates and is killed, nor below that at which it cannot be formed. We may perhaps speculate further and assume that when the temperature was higher the elements that enter into the composition of proto plasm first combined, and that when the temperature was reduced, that then the compound so formed acquired the character and properties which distinguish protoplasm at the present day.

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