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THE AMEBIC AN NATURALIST 



[Vol. L 



views put forward by any man do but represent the visions 

 conjured up by his imagination, based upon the slender 

 foundation of his personal knowledge, more or less lim- 

 ited, or intuition, more or less fallacious, of an infinite 

 world of natural phenomena. Consequently such views 

 may be expected to diverge as widely as do temperaments. 

 If, therefore, I venture upon such speculations, I do so 

 with a sense of personal responsibility and as one wishing 

 to stimulate discussion rather than to lay down dogma. 



To me, therefore, the train of argument that I have set 

 forth with regard to the nature of the chromatinic constit- 

 uents of living organisms appears to lead to the conclusion 

 that the earliest living beings were minute, possibly ultra- 

 microscopic particles which were of the nature of chroma- 

 tin. How far the application of the term chromatin to the 

 hypothetical primordial form of life is justified from the 

 point of view of substance, that is to say in a biochemical 

 sense, must be left uncertain. In using the term chro- 

 matin I must be understood to do so in a strictly biological 

 sense, meaning thereby that these earliest living things 

 were biological units or individuals which were the ances- 

 tors, in a continuous propagative series, of the chromatinic 

 grains and particles known to us at the present day as 

 universally-occurring constituents of living organisms. 

 Such a conception postulates no fixity of chemical nature ; 

 on the contrary, it implies that as substance the primitive 

 chromatin was highly inconstant, infinitely variable, and 

 capable of specific differentiation in many divergent di- 

 rections. 



For these hypothetical primitive organisms we may use 

 Mereschkowsky's term biococci. They must have been 

 free-living organisms capable of building up their living 

 bodies by synthesis of simple chemical compounds. We 

 have as yet no evidence of the existence of biococci at the 

 present time as free-living organisms; the nearest ap- 



nished by the organisms known collectively as Chlamy- 

 dozoa, which up to the present have been found to occur 



