Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    vegetable life on the Earth is to be similarly explained ? . . . Should the time [ever arrive] when this Earth comes into collision with another body, comparable in dimensions to itself, [and should this happen] when it is still clothed as at present with vegetation, many great and small fragments carrying seed and living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space. Hence and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. . . . The hypothesis that life originated on this Earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world may seem wild and visionary ; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.” This pronouncement of Lord Kelvin’s attracted much attention from the Press, and was considerably jeered at. There was a recrudescence of jest about it after I had gone to Liverpool, ten years later, when I wrote an article pointing out that no attempt at the origin of life had been made, but only a suggestion as to a possible origin of the life on this planet. Inciden¬ tally I said that the utterance of a great man might be erroneous, and might be absurd, but not so absurd that any newspaper writer between ten o’clock and midnight could see through it, clean it out, and serve it up exposed for your breakfast edification. On this I received a comic protest from Charles Beard, a leading-