CHAPTER I 



WHAT LIFE IS, AND WHENCE IT COMES 



When primeval man first rose above the brutes from which 

 he was developed ; when, by means of his superior intellect, 

 he had acquired speech and the use of fire ; and more 

 especially when his reasoning and reflecting faculties caused 

 him to ask those questions which every child now asks about 

 the world around it — what is this ? and why is that ? — he 

 would, for the first time, perceive and wonder at the great con- 

 trast between the living and the not-living things around him. 



He would first observe that the animals which he 

 caught and killed for food, though so unlike himself out- 

 wardly, were yet very like his fellow-men in their internal 

 structure. He would see that their bony framework was 

 almost identical in shape and in substance with his own ; 

 that they possessed flesh and blood, that they had eyes, 

 nose, and ears ; that presumably they had senses like his 

 own, sensations like his own ; that they lived by food and 

 drink as he did, and yet were in many ways so different. 

 Above all, he would soon notice how inferior they were to 

 himself in intellect, inasmuch as they never made fires, 

 never used any kind of tools or weapons ; and that, although 

 many of them were much stronger than he was, yet his 

 superiority in these things, and in making traps or pitfalls 

 to capture them, showed that he was really their superior 

 and their master. 



Gradually, probably very slowly, he would extend these 

 observations to all the lower forms of life, even when both 

 externally and internally he could find no resemblance 

 whatever to his own body; to crabs and winged insects, to 



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