A Three-fold Devclopmcui. 143 



Almighty flat the inorganic was suddenly changed to the 

 organic. In some way the inorganic must have been 

 changed or developed into the organic. All life, plant or 

 animal, has a body consisting of material derived in 

 some way from earth, air and water. There are in living 

 beings only four principal elements, with small traces 

 of some others. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, 

 together with a very little of sulphur and phosphorus, 

 are about all the elements that go to make up life of any 

 kind, from the highest to the lowest. It is probable that 

 carbon is the most prominent substance in the wonderful 

 combination we call protoplasm, which in slow opera- 

 tion and by successive modifications has developed all 

 the teeming life which has since covered the earth and 

 peopled the waters. The protoplasmic cell is the first 

 stage in visible structure, and is apparently very nearly 

 alike for all forms of life from man to the lowest iDlant. 

 While the change of the inert inorganic matter to the 

 living organic life is constantly going on before our eyes, 

 we may, perhaps, never wrest the secret from nature. 

 By the agency of chlorophyll, the plant is ever changing 

 the inorganic into the organic and building up its cells 

 of living matter. This is a mystery we may never fath- 

 om, the production of life from lifeless matter. Prof. 

 Moseley said in Nature, Sept. 3d, 1885: "It was in the 

 littoral region that all the primary branches of the zoo- 

 logical family tree were formed; all terrestrial and deep 

 sea forms have passed through a littoral phase, and 

 amongst the representatives of the littoral fauna the 

 recapitulative history in the form of series of larval con- 

 ditions is most completely retained." 



So far as human knowledge can say, life first began 

 in the shallow waters near the shores of that old Lauren- 

 tian ocean, far up toward the north pole. Which form of 

 life, plant or animal, was first brought into existence, is 

 not easy to tell with certainty. As we understand the 

 life of today, it would be easy and safe to say that plant 

 life had an existence before animal life, but the sur- 

 rounding conditions of that immensely distant time may 

 have been so different from any thing we now know that 

 a wider knowledge might materially change our ideas on 



