120 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



cell. It remains in the lowest imaginable grade of 

 organic individuality.' Professer Haeckel afterwards 

 says: c The Monera are indeed Protista. They are 

 neither animals nor plants. They are organisms of 

 the most primitive kind: among which the distinc- 

 tion between animals and plants does not yet exist. 

 But the term " organism" itself seems scarcely ap- 

 plicable to these simplest forms of life; for in the 

 whole conception of the "organism" is especially 

 implied the construction of the whole from dis- 

 similar parts, from organs or limbs. At least, two 

 separate parts must be united to complete the descrip- 

 tion of a body as an organism in this original sense. 

 Every true Amceba, every true (i. e. nucleus-including) 

 animal and vegetable cell, every animal-egg, is, in this 

 sense, already an elementary organism, composed of 

 two different organs, the inner nucleus and the outer 

 cell-matter (Plasma or Protoplasma) . Compared with 

 these last the Monera are strictly " organisms without 

 organs." Only in a physiological sense can we still 

 call them organisms ; as individual portions of organic 

 matter, which fulfil the essential life-functions of all 

 organisms, nourishment, growth, and reproduction. But 

 all these different functions are not yet limited to dif- 

 ferent parts. They are all, still, executed equally by 

 every part of the body V 



1 Prof. Haeckel then continues : ' If the natural history of the 

 Monera is already, on these grounds, of the highest interest as well for 

 morphology as for physiology, this interest will be still more increased 



