210 WHAT IS LIFE? 



complex organisms, the records of which we find in the 

 various strata of the earth's crust, and the organisms 

 which are living to-day, until we reach the highest 

 animal Man. Now comes the all-important fact, 

 Man himself, you, reader, and every being which has 

 been born, started existence from a similar mass of 

 protoplasm, this altered into a cell having a nucleus 

 and nucleolus the Egg, and this slowly altered into 

 similar forms, such as have been developed during the 

 time of geological records. 1 Human lungs are a modi- 



Do o 



fication of the swimming bladder of fishes. Each man 



assume that the first organisms, or the first few organisms from 

 which all the others are derived (at all events, the simplest Moiiera 

 or primaeval cytods), were created as such, and that the Creator 

 conferred upon them the capacity of developing further in a mechani- 

 cal way. I leave the reader to choose between this miraculous idea 

 and the hypothesis of spontaneous generation. In my opinion the 

 idea that the Creator should have interfered at this one point in the 

 regular course of the development of matter, which otherwise proceeds 

 entirely without His co-operation, must be as unsatisfactory to a 

 credulous as to a scientific mind. If, on the other hand, we assume 

 for the origin of the first organisms the hypothesis of spontaneous 

 generation, which, for reasons discussed above and especially by the 

 discovery of the Monera, has lost its former difficulty, we obtain an 

 uninterrupted, natural connection between the development of the 

 earth and the organisms which it has produced ; and, further, we 

 also recognize in the last still doubtful point the unity of all nature, 

 and the unity of her laws of development." (Idem, vol. ii. p. 71.) 



1 " The very same marvel actually recurs before our eyes in the 

 short space of nine months, during the embryonic development of 

 each human individual. The same series of multifariously diverse 

 forms, through which our brute ancestors passed in the course of 

 many millions of years, has been traversed by every Man during the 

 first 40 weeks of his individual existence within the maternal 

 body." (" The Evolution of Man," Prof. Ernst Haeckel, 1883, vol. ii. 

 p. 5.) 



