204 HAECKEL 



or the protozoon ; another the plant, another the 

 animal. Historically it all hangs together. The 

 same laws hold sway throughout. In framing my 

 arbitrary definitions I can say either that the dead 

 is living, or that the living does not difer 

 essentially from the dead. In the chain of living 

 things man comes from the primitive cell, the 

 moneron. This in its turn has developed from 

 something earlier — ^'naturally" developed. The 

 very idea of life forces us to seek the predecessors 

 of the monera. Hence we speak of " spontaneous 

 generation," as what was dead according to our 

 ordinary use of language has begun to live. In 

 point of fact it is merely development of a unified 

 whole. There is no gap, no leap, no act that is 

 not natural. The dead and the living never were 

 really antithetic. 



The insistent statement that not only does the 

 living approach the inorganic, but the inorganic 

 approaches the living, is quite '' Haeckelian." 

 The study of the " life " of crystals is one of the 

 best parts of the book. Later generations will 

 appreciate it. We are much too narrow to-day 

 when we merely reflect that life, even the life of 

 man, can be traced by evolution down to what we 

 call dead matter. We forget that this ^^ matter" 

 is already high, since it potentially contains life, 

 and even man, the crown of life. Many people 

 imagine that the derivation of man from *^dead 

 matter " is equal to turning a king into a beggar. 

 They do not reflect that, on the other hand, a 

 beggar is turned into a king. When I say that life 



