It is especially disappointing in regard to
the living population. The very few fossils we find in the upper
Archaean rocks are so similar to those we shall discuss in the
next chapter that we may disregard them, and the seams of
carbon-shales, iron-ore, and limestone, suggest only, at the
most, that life was already abundant. We must turn elsewhere for
some information on the origin and early development of life.
The question of the origin of life I will dismiss with a brief
account of the various speculations of recent students of
science. Broadly speaking, their views fall into three classes.
Some think that the germs of life may have come to the earth from
some other body in the universe; some think that life was evolved
out of non-living matter in the early ages of the earth, under
exceptional conditions which we do not at present know, or can
only dimly conjecture; and some think that life is being evolved
from non-life in nature to-day, and always has been so evolving.
The majority of scientific men merely assume that the earliest
living things were no exception to the general process of
evolution, but think that we have too little positive knowledge
to speculate profitably on the manner of their origin.
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