THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 429 



Other Modes of Origin of Arcellin?e. Origin of Ciliated Infusoria 

 from eggs of Gasteropods and Rotifers. Other Modes of Analytic 

 Heterogenesis in Rotifer 'eggs.' 



THE observations we have already recorded afford 

 abundant evidence as to the readiness with which 

 mere formless living matter takes on what biologists 

 have been led to regard as quite specific living shapes — 

 shapes of a kind which have hitherto been considered 

 as the accumulated products of modifications that 

 have been going on in one ancestral line for ages ^ 

 The facts are so new and strange that, even now, many 

 of them would seem almost incredible to ourselves, if 

 their truth and reality had not been guaranteed by the 

 testimony of our own senses. As it is, however, all we 

 can do is frankly to admit their occurrence, although, for 

 the present, they are more or less beyond our compre- 

 hension. An investigation of the changes which took 

 place in the ^proligerous pellicle' of organic, solutions 

 compelled us to assert that a Paramecium might actually 

 come into being de novo^ with all its specific characters, 

 in a few days. And this statement has since received the 



' How much the facts are opposed to what has been anticipated may 

 be judged by comparing them with the comparatively recently-published 

 statement of the most distinguished exponent of the Evolution philo- 

 sophy, who says : — ' The evolution of specific shapes must, like all other 

 organic evolution, have resulted from the actions and reactions between 

 such incipient types and their environment. To reach by this process 

 the comparatively well-specialized forms of ordinary Infusoria must, I 

 conceive, have taken an enormous period of time.' (See Herbert Spencer's 

 ' Principles of Biology,' Appendix, pp. 480, 481). 



