AMCEBiE. 



53 



reference to the primasval ancestral form of the Amoeba, 

 directly enables us to give a definite answer to the old hu- 

 morous riddle: Which was first, the egg or the hen? We can 





Fig. 167. — A crawling Amoeba (much enlarged). The whole organism has 

 the form-value of a simple naked cell and moves about by means of change- 

 able processes, which are extended from the protoplasmic body and again 

 drawn in. In the inside is the bright-coloured, roundish cell-kernel or 

 nucleus. 



Fig. 168. — Egg-cell of a Chalk-Sponge (Olynthns) . The egg-cell creeps 

 about in the body of the Sponge by extending variable processes, like those 

 of the ordinary Amceba. 



now very simply answer this Sphinx-question, with which 

 our opponents try to shake or even to refute the Theory of 

 Evolution. The eg-g existed much earlier than tlie hen. Of 

 course it did not exist in the form of a bird's egg, but as an 

 undifierentiated amoeboid cell of the simplest form. The 

 egg existed independently during thousands of years as a 

 simplest one-celled organism, as the Amoeba. It was only 

 after the descendants of these one-celled Primitive Animals 

 had developed into many-celled animal forms, and after 

 these had sexually differentiated, that the egg, in the present 

 physiological sense of the word, originated from the amoe- 



