330 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
elementary substance, namely, carbon (Gen. Morph. i. 
122-130). 
Of all elements, carbon is to us by far the most important 
and interesting, because this simple substance plays the 
largest part in all animal and vegetable bodies known to 
us. It is that element which, by its peculiar tendency to 
form complicated combinations with the other elements, 
produces the greatest variety of chemical compounds, and 
among them the forms and living substance of animal and 
vegetable bodies. Carbon is especially distinguished by 
the fact that it can unite with the other elements in 
infinitely manifold relations of number and weight. By the 
combination of carbon with three other elements, with 
oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen (to which generally sulphur, 
and frequently, also, phosphorus is added), there arise those 
exceedingly important compounds which we have become 
acquainted with as the first and most indispensable 
substratum of all vital phenomena, the albuminous combina- 
tions, or albuminous bodies (protean matter). 
We have before this (p. 185) become acquainted with the 
simplest of all species of organisms in the Monera, whose 
entire bodies when completely developed consist of nothing 
but a semi-fluid albuminous lump; they are organisms which 
are of the utmost importance for the theory of the first 
origin of life. But most other organisms, also, at a certain 
period of their existence—at least, in the first period of their 
life—in the shape of egg-cells or germ-cells, are essentially 
nothing but simple little lumps of such albuminous forma- 
tive matter, known as plasma, or protoplasma. They then 
differ from the Monera only by the fact that in the interior 
of the albuminous corpuscle the cell-kernel, or nucleus, has 
