THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



thing new in this great depth. It touches not 

 hard rock, but a tenacious ice cold slime. The 

 lead that has come down from above is embedded 

 in it. Now a pale glow shines far off, it is distant 

 passing animal light. Something moves in the 

 shme, disturbed, it writhes around. This slimy 

 ooze also has its life, the extreme of life-adjust- 

 ment. Fish lie in wait, crabs plow themselves 

 along. They lie in the slime like moles in the 

 ground, and like these moles, their eyes have 

 almost wholly disappeared because they did not 

 need them. So these fish and crabs are blind. 

 Here in the slime, shining is no longer of any 

 use. The seeing eye which no illuminating can 

 help is wholly superfluous. So the economic 

 principle of adjustment has removed it. In the 

 black skin of these fishes there remains no long- 

 er any trace of an eye. The crab there that 

 feels with its delicate antennae through the slime 

 bears ghostlike yet, an eye-stalk but the point 

 is empty. With him also sight has been abol- 

 ished. This process of adjustment goes back 

 to the earliest times. Many million years ago 

 when the deep, deep sea stood over Bohemia in- 

 stead as today over the abysses of the South 

 Sea, trilobite crabs lived in the ooze of the bot- 

 tom and they then possessed no eyes. It is as 

 though when we plunged into this deepest abyss 

 we plunged at the same time into the most prim- 

 itive times. The millions of years of the earth's 

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