THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 151 



can ever suppress it." We hear again the older 

 Sethe thundering his intrepid reply: *'You will 

 have to shoot the law first." 



At the close he glances briefly at the difficulties 

 the theory presents. We must regard even the 

 first beginnings of life as the outcome of 

 *' evolution." Naturally. Darwin's God has no 

 use for this prophet. But how shall we conceive 

 it ? Was the thing that first developed from the 

 inorganic "a simple cell, such a being as those 

 that now exist in such numbers as independent 

 beings on the ambiguous frontier of the animal 

 and vegetal worlds?" Or was it a particle of 

 plasm merely, "like certain amoeboid organisms 

 that do not seem to have attained yet the 

 organisation of a cell " ? Again the simple 

 question contained a whole programme. 



Schleiden had first shown in 1838 that the 

 body of any plant can be dissolved into tiny 

 living corpuscles, which he called " cells," because 

 they often had the appearance of a filled honey- 

 comb. A year later Schwann proved, in Johannes 

 Miiller's laboratory, that the higher animal also 

 is a product of these cells. The cell was re- 

 cognised as the living unit that composed the 

 oak and the rose, the elephant and the worm, 

 Man himself, in fine, was but a pyramid of these 

 cells— or, to speak more accurately (as each cell 

 has its own life), an immense community of cells, 

 a cell-state. 



Virchow had, as we saw, laid the greatest stress 

 on this last and most important deduction from 



