OMNIPRESENCE OF LIFE 1293 



this setting apart for special purposes. The start- 

 ing-point of Life is a single cell that is to say, a 

 microscopic sac, filled with liquid and granules, and 

 having within it a nucleus, or smaller sac. Paley 

 has somewhere remarked that in the early stages 

 there is no difference discernible between a frog and 

 a philosopher. It is very true truer than he con- 

 ceived. In the earliest stage of all, both the Ba- 

 trachian and the Philosopher are nothing but single 

 cells, although the one cell will develop into an 

 Aristotle or a Newton, and the other will get no 

 higher than the cold, damp, croaking animal which 

 boys will pelt, anatomists dissect, and Frenchmen 

 eat. From the starting-point of a single cell this 

 is the course taken : the cell divides itself into two, 

 the two become four, the four eight, and so on, till 

 a mass of cells is formed not unlike the shape of 

 a mulberry. This mulberry-mass then becomes a 

 sac, with double envelopes or walls; the inner wall, 

 turned toward the yelk, or food, becomes the assimi- 

 lating surface for the whole; the outer wall, turned 

 toward the surrounding medium, becomes the sur- 

 face which is to bring frog and philosopher into 

 contact and relation with the external world the 

 Non-Ego, as the philosopher in after life will call it. 

 Here we perceive the first grand "setting apart," or 

 differentiation, has taken place; the embryo having 

 an assimilating surface, which has little to do with 

 the external world, and a sensitive, contractile sur- 

 face, which has little to do with the preparation and 

 transport of food. The embryo is no longer a mass 

 of similar cells ; it is already become dissimilar, dif- 



