THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



foundation for it was found in the monera I had de- 

 scribed, the very simple organisms without organs that 

 had up to that time been overlooked or thrust aside. 

 It is of radical importance, in giving a naturalistic 

 solution of the problem of the origin of life, to start from 

 these structureless granules of living matter, and not — 

 as still generally happens — from the cell; these nucleated 

 elementary organisms could not be the earliest archigo- 

 nous living things, but must have been evolved second- 

 arily from the unnucleated monera. Hence, I made a 

 very thorough study of these rudimentary organisms in 

 my Monograph on the Monera (1870), and endeavored to 

 formulate it more clearly later on (in the first volume of 

 the Systematic Phytogeny). In regard to the chemical 

 question of the first formation of plasm and its inorganic 

 preparation, Edward Pfluger conducted some valuable 

 investigations, and recognized that the radical of cyano- 

 gen was the chief element of the living plasm. I may 

 therefore distinguish two different stages of the theory 

 — ^my own older autogony-hypothesis and the later 

 cyanogen-hypothesis. 



The theory of abiogenesis, or archigony, which I 

 advanced in 1866, and have developed in later writings, 

 appeals directly to the biochemical facts that modern 

 vegetal physiology has firmly established. The chief of 

 these facts is that even the living green plant-cell has the 

 synthetic faculty of plasmodomism or carbon-assimila- 

 tion; that is to say, it is able to build up, by a chemical 

 synthesis and reduction, from simple inorganic com- 

 pounds (water, carbonic acid, nitric acid, and ammonia), 

 the complex albuminous compounds which we call 

 plasm or protoplasm, and which we regard as the active 

 living substance and the true material basis of all vital 

 function {cf. chapter vi.). All botanists are now agreed 

 that this most important process of vegetal life, the 

 fundamental process of all organic life and all organiza- 



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