UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



knowing, the truth of many things about which 

 some of his fellows are so certain. 



Haeckel's faith is so robust that he has no trouble 

 in seeing life arise from lifeless matter by easy nat- 

 ural processes. But it is extraordinary matter that 

 he starts with — unorganized matter charged with 

 such potency that it goes forward from step to step 

 up the ladder, from compound to compound, each 

 step a nearer approach to life, till what he names 

 the monera, an organism without organs, is reached, 

 then organized protoplasm, then the cell, then the 

 functioning organism. The first bit of unicellular 

 life is charged with such possibilities of development 

 that the whole world of living things lies folded in it: 

 man and all that lies below him, all the orders and 

 suborders and species of the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms, are latent in the first bit of life-stuff that 

 Haeckel invokes by the magic of words from inert 

 matter. 



For his start Haeckel goes back to the first harden- 

 ing of the earth's crust, the formation of water in a 

 fluid condition, and great changes in the carbonic- 

 laden atmosphere. Under these conditions a series 

 of complicated nitrogenous carbon compounds was 

 formed, and these first produced albumen or protein. 

 The molecules of albumen arranged themselves in a 

 certain way, according to their unstable chemical 

 attractions, in larger groups of molecules; and these 

 combined to form still larger aggregates, and thus 

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