GREAT STEPS IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION 387 



f ul of dust which God enchants. He is the mysterious magic 

 which possesses " — not protoplasm merely, but — '' the world " 

 (Interpretation of Nature, p. 77). 



§ 2. The Nature of the First Organisms. 



Regarding the first organisms we know nothing, but biolo- 

 gists who have given a lifetime to the study of cells and 

 simple creatures are able to make certain useful statements. 

 It is quite certain that most of the Protozoa, even everyday 

 forms like Amcebse and Slipper Animalcules, are the results 

 of long-continued evolution. We may call them unicellular 

 or non-cellular, but they are masterpieces of complexity. 

 The problematical first organisms were not like them. 

 A minute Infusorian called Bellerophon (Penard, 1914) 

 shows on each side a number of prominences like guns 

 projecting from port-holes. Minute cysts may be seen travel- 

 ling up into these prominences, and there, when occasion 

 demands, they explode into offensive threads. It is plain 

 that Bellerophon is not a simple organism, not a Protozoon 

 in the literal sense. 



The late Prof. E. A. Minchin, an expert Protistologist, 

 suggested that the earliest living beings were very minute, 

 possibly ultra-microscopic, units or biococci of chromatin, — 

 the protein material that is characteristic of the nuclei of 

 all cells. Suppose a firm envelope to be formed around 

 one of these chromatin globules, and behold a bacterial type 

 of organism. Suppose the chromatin globules to increase in 

 number and then to show some complexity of arrangement, 

 and suppose a non-chromatinic ground-substance (cytoplasm) 

 to accumulate between them and the envelope, and behold 

 a primitive vegetable unit. 



But suppose that around the chromatin granules there 



