240 PEANTATICIE Vil) eet LAV VO LRG 
“5. That each organization and each form acquired 
by this course of things and by the circumstances 
which there have concurred, were preserved and trans- 
mitted successively by generation [heredity] until new 
modifications of these organizations and of these 
forms have been acquired by the same means and by 
new circumstances; 
“6, Finally, that from the uninterrupted concur- 
rence of these causes or from these laws of nature, 
together with much time and with an almost incon- 
ceivable diversity of influential circumstances, or- 
ganic beings of all the orders have been successively 
formed. 
“Considerations so extraordinary, relatively to the 
ideas that the vulgar have generally formed on the 
nature and origin of living bodies, will be naturally 
regarded by you as stretches of the imagination 
unless I hasten to lay before you some observations 
and facts which supply the most complete evidence. 
“From the point of view of knowledge based on 
observation the philosophic naturalist feels convinced 
that it is in that which is called the lowest classes of 
the two organic kingdoms—z.e., in those which com- 
prise the most simply organized beings—that we can 
collect facts the most luminous and observations the 
most decisive on the production and the reproduction 
of the living beings in question; on the causes of the 
formation of the organs of these wonderful beings; 
and on those of their developments, of their diversity 
and their multiplicity, which increase with the con- 
course of generations, of times, and of influential 
circumstances, 
‘““Hence we may be assured that it is only among 
the singular beings of these lowest classes, and espe- 
cially in the lowest orders of these classes, that it is 
possible to find on both sides the primitive germs of 
life, and consequently the germs of the most impor. 
tant faculties of animality and vegetality.” 
