53 



reference to the prima?val ancestral form of the Amoeba, 

 directly enables us to give a definite answer to the old hu- 

 morous riddle : Which was first, the egg or the hen ? We can 



FIG. 167. A crawling Amoeba (much enlarged). The whole organism has 

 the form-value of a simple naked cell and moves about by means of change- 

 able processes, which are extended from the protoplasmic body and again 

 drawn in. In the inside is the bright-coloured, roundish cell-kernel or 

 nucleus. 



FIG. 168. Egg-cell of a Chalk-Sponge (Olynthus). The egg-cell creeps 

 about in the body of tlie Sponge by extending variable processes, like those 

 of the ordinary Amoeba. 



now very simply answer this Sphinx-question, with which 

 our opponents try to shake or even to refute the Theory of 

 Evolution. The egg existed much earlier than the hen. Of 

 course it did not exist in the form of a bird's egg, but as an 

 undifferentiated amosboid cell of the simplest form. The 

 egg existed independently during thousands of years as a 

 simplest one-celled organism, as the Amoeba. It was only 

 after the descendants of these one-celled Primitive Animals 

 had developed into many-celled animal forms, and after 

 these had sexually differentiated, that the egg, in the present 

 physiological sense of the word, originated from the amoe- 



