INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 15 



cause of original generation, Darwin does not occupy himself 

 with the question of the origin of life itself. He simply 

 assumes that in all probability every organic being that has 

 ever existed on the earth has descended from some prototype, 

 into which life was breathed by the Creator. Haeckel, 1 

 however, Darwin's zealous follower in Germany, goes further. 

 To him the question of man's origin is not only the question 

 of questions, surpassing all other problems of the theory of 

 evolution, but it brings him back to the question of original 

 generation. He distinguishes two varieties : autogony, or 

 origin of organic matter from an inorganic, non-albuminous 

 fluid, and plasmogony, or origin of organisms in a fluid con- 

 taining carbon in some form. Here natural science coincides 

 with certain of the ancient theories of cosmogony. In many 

 of the old traditions of creation, life was held to have originated 

 in the darkness of the deep, and in the latter half of the last 

 century scientific research actually revealed the fact that in 

 the lowest depths of the ocean, where an even temperature of 

 4 Celsius is perennially maintained, protoplasm existed in the 

 form of the Gymnocytoda, to which is allied the Bathybius, 

 a low form of life, discovered by Huxley, consisting of a con- 

 glomeration of jelly-like particles. To these succeed in a 

 progressive scale of development the Lapocytoda, furnished 

 with an integumentary membrane, formed by the congealment 

 of the outer surface, then the first cellules with a nucleus, and 

 lastly the testaceous cytoda with nucleus. 



Like the belief in the central, position of the earth, the 

 conviction of man's central place in Nature dominated thought 

 throughout the Middle Ages. Hence it is oddly inconsistent 

 that the encyclopaedias of the early Middle Ages (Isidor von 

 Sevilla, sixth to seventh century ; the Venerable Bede, seventh 

 to eighth century ; Rhabanus Maurus, eighth to ninth century) 

 and more especially the voluminous works of the scholastic 

 naturalists of the following centuries, place the anatomy and 

 physiology of man side by side with that of plants and animals. 

 Indeed, -in the works of Albertus Magnus on natural science 

 (1193-1280), the description of man receives but scant attention. 



1 E. Haeckel, Our Present-day Ideas upon the Origin of Man. Bonn, Strauss, 

 1899. 



