160 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



directly from the rocks. We can assert that plants originally 

 formed, collecting their carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen 

 and phosphorus from the inorganic substances around them 

 and then, with their oily secretions forming emulsions with 

 water, creating, as Butschli has suggested, the primitive 

 animals which were to devour them. It is to the soil that 

 we should look as the seat of the origin of organic life, not 

 the sea. 



