
FINAL DECISIVE EXPERIMENTS 203 
low grades, for untold millions of years ? Yet those 
_whose views are at present most widely accepted 
would have us believe that ages and ages before the 
advent of Man or his immediate predecessors upon 
the earth, the ancestry of the Bacterium, the Amceba, 
the Monad, the Mould, or any of the low infusorial 
animalcules now to be seen in their respective 
habitats, had been tenants of our globe. The mere 
suggestion seems to carry absurdity on its face. If 
this were really so, then we could only expect that 
such forms would be the very types of conservatism 
and stability; whereas, as a matter of fact, all such 
organisms are rather the best types of change and 
mutability. . . . It is impossible to say that they 
have preserved their primitive forms by reason of 
their existence in unchanging environments. The 
very reverse of this must have been the fact; and 
even now such organisms are to be met with 
abundantly over the face of the earth, and in the 
most diverse situations. . . . But in accordance with 
the views advanced in this work, the present-day 
existence of these organisms may be fully ex- 
plained, and is just what might be expected— 
if they are ever seething up anew by Archebiosis 
and Heterogenesis.” 
