12 JOURNAL OF THE [January, 



shrined an instant before ha/d flown ! The profane touch of 

 inquisitive Science had driven it forth, an immaterial, intangible, 

 mysterious power. The very process of investigation made in- 

 vestigation impossible ; and, instead of capturing the animating 

 principle, we merely produced a wreck. 



It is hard to understand why there may not be as many dif- 

 ferent kinds of protoplasm as there are different kinds of organ- 

 isms of which protoplasm is a constituent. Perhaps the apparent 

 similarity in all protoplasmic bodies is only a matter of optics ; 

 and that when we have evolved a microscope objective of suffi- 

 cient power we may discover that the Moner and the Amoeba 

 have such complicated organizations that, instead of being at 

 the bottom, they stand midway in the scale of living things. 



When we consider the limited range of sight we now have, 

 even with our best appliances, it cannot but seem presumptuous 

 to speak of loiuest things and ultifnate structures with anything 

 but a hypothetical signification. At any rate, all that we as yet 

 know of the simplest organic beings that are visible to us, indi- 

 cates that they have strongly marked characteristics and that 

 they are sharply defined one from another. There is, in fact, 

 no indefiniteness in genealogical lines, nor anything at all re- 

 sembling heterogenesis, no matter how low down we are able to 



go. 



Because at one point in its life-history Protococcus, for ex- 

 ample, can hardly be distinguished from a flagellate animalcule, 

 it would not be safe or scientific to conclude that the one form 

 may pass into, or ever has passed into, the other. For there is 

 no more reason for believing that motile protoplasmic zoospores 

 may, by heterogenesis, develop into Foraminifera, or any other 

 form of Protozoa, than there is for accepting the teaching of 

 Aristotle that grape-vines bloom with living butterflies. Nor is 

 there as yet any more scientific basis for the theory that proto- 

 cocci, or torulse, or bacteria may arise, or ever have arisen, by 

 abiogenesis, from solutions of salts or decoctions of organic 

 matter, than there is for the notion that Globergerin^e or Forami- 

 nifera may 4evelop from vegetable zoospores. 



" This," says Professor Haeckel, " is the point at which most 

 naturalists, even at the present day, are inclined to give up the 

 attempt at natural explanation and take refuge in the miracle of 

 an inconceivable creation." But not so Professor Haeckel. 



