THE DARWINIAN THEORY 



that biologists are all equally lost in try- 

 ing to imagine it. Because, it turns out, 

 that all forms of life, no matter how large 

 they may grow afterwards, have to begin 

 as specks of protoplasm visible only by 

 high-power microscopes. There is no help 

 for it: without a microbic beginning no 

 form of life, great or small, is a universal 

 law. The sulphur bottom whale of the 

 Pacific, though he may bulk afterwards 

 and weigh as much as 3000 men, yet first 

 starts in his one microscopic primordial 

 cell just as a towering oak also does. All 

 biological investigation, therefore, had to 

 be shifted from adult living forms to their 

 first beginnings, when only a microscope 

 can see them, with the result of a corre- 

 sponding shrinkage in the belief of many 

 Darwinians. When sheep, dogs, fowls, 

 and such like familiar creatures were the 

 objects of study, it was comparatively easy 

 to trace the origins of their many varia- 



