1 8 The Life Btory of the Fish 



may come in contact with the living cells which line the 

 mouth of the patient — or unless you are engaged in amorous 

 activities, which is practically the only occasion when the 

 truly living parts of two separate human individuals come 

 in contact with each other. 



Why can the fish expose its living cells to the world while 

 we cannot? The reason is very simple. Cells can live only 

 in a liquid medium. This holds true of all cells, plant and 

 animal, from bacteria to human. Any of our cells which are 

 exposed permanently to the air will die. But the fish lives 

 in water. The liquid medium which his cells need for ex- 

 istence surrounds him on all sides. He can wear them on his 

 sleeve, so to speak, without danger. It was not until animals 

 came out of the water that they had to protect their living 

 cells with a dead covering — an accomplishment, incidentally, 

 which poses the question squarely to the mutationists. Did 

 this animal, fish, amphibian, or whatever he was, have to 

 acquire, by a chance recombination of the germ material, a 

 coating of dead cells for his skin before he came out on land? 

 Or was it his emergence on land, with its necessity for pro- 

 tection, that brought about the creation of the protective 

 coating? The latter hypothesis seems the easier one to accept. 

 One can imagine the outer living layer dying when the ani- 

 mal became a land-dweller, and coming to form a protective 

 coating for the cells underneath. To which the mutationists 

 answer that no one has ever yet succeeded in training a gold- 

 fish to live out of the water, and that the fish which do suc- 

 cessfully come out in the air and stay there for some time 

 and even travel over dusty ground are those which have a 

 special layer of dead material covering their skins, such as 

 the armored catfish, and that several fish which remain 

 permanently under the water, such as the trunk-fish, have 

 coverings of dead material, proving that this requisite for 



