THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



respect of chemistry, morphology, and physiology. If 

 that is really so, the cell cannot possibly be the primitive 

 organism; if it were, we should have a miracle at the 

 beginning of organic life on the earth. The theory of 

 natural evolution clearly and distinctly demands that 

 the cell (in this sense) is a secondary development from 

 a simpler, primary, elementary organism, a homogene- 

 ous cytode. There are still living to-day very simple 

 protists which do not tally with this definition, and which 

 I designated monera in 1866. As they must necessarily 

 have preceded the real cells, they may also be called 

 " precellular organisms." 



The earliest organisms to live on the earth, with which 

 the wonderful drama of life began, can, in the present 

 condition of biological science, only be conceived as 

 homogeneous particles of plasm — biogens or groups of 

 biogens, in which there was not yet the division of 

 nucleus and cell-body which characterizes the real cell. 

 I gave the name " cytodes " to these unnucleated cells in 

 1866, and joined them with the real nucleated cells under 

 the general head of "plastids." I also endeavored to 

 prove that such cytodes still exist in the form of indepen- 

 dent monera, and in 1870 I described in my Monograph 

 on the Monera a number of protists which do not tally 

 with the above definition. 



Fifty years ago I made the first careful observations of 

 living monera {protama^ha and protogcnes), and described 

 theminmy General Morphology {vol. i., pp. 133-5; vol.ii., 

 p. xxii.) as structureless organisms without organs and 

 the real beginnings of organic life. Soon afterwards, 

 during a stay in the Canary Islands, I succeeded in 

 following the continuous life-history of a related organ- 

 ism of the rhizopod type, which behaved like a very 

 simple mycetozoon, but differed in having no nucleus; I 

 have reproduced the picture of it in the first plate of my 

 History of Creation. The description of this orange-red 



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