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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