HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS SCOPE AND LIMITS

planets. Life, therefore, is almost certainly a veryrareph6llomenon.

Even on the earth it is transitory: at first the earth was too hot,
and in the end it will be too cold. Some highly conjectural dates
are suggested in Spencer Jones's Worlds Without End (p. 19). The
age of the earth is probably less than 3,000 million years; the
beginnings of life may be placed at about 1,700 million years ago.
Mammals began about 6o million years ago; anthropoid apes about
8 million, man about I million, It is probable that all forms of
life on earth have evolved from unicellular organisms. How these
were first formed we do not know, but their origin is no more
mysterious than that of helium atoms. There is no reason to
suppose living matter subject to any Jaws other than those to
which inanimate matter is subject, and considerable reason to
think that everything in the behaviour of living matter is theoreti•
cally explicable in terms of physics and chemistry.

So