256 



14. I prefer, however, for the argument in this paper, to 

 take Mr. Darwin's view of the " commencement of life/' for it 

 will exempt that gentleman from the charge of atheism, and 

 it will save us a great deal of discussion, which, although 

 intensely interesting, would exceed the limits of this paper. 



15. Having breathed, then, the "breath of life'' into an 

 organism, the necessities of Darwinism require that it should 

 be endowed wdth a potentiality by which it would evolve into 

 all the known living forms in the w^orld.* 



16. Following the obvious sequence implied in the doctrine 

 of evolution, such a form must have been of a vegetable nature, 

 inasmuch as animals have no power of creating or forming 

 within themselves the elements of food. Without vegetable 

 life no animal could exist now or have done so at any period in 

 the history of living things. Professor Hackel has discovered 

 a family of low forms of life, which he says are intermediate 

 between the vegetable and animal worlds ; and among his 

 Protista, as he calls them, he places the Protamcebse previously 

 alluded to (para. 5), as well as funo;i ; all the well-known forms 

 of Araoebse, — the Noctiluca, which produce phosphorescence 

 of the sea; and the Khizopoda, a large group of what have 

 hitherto been considered animals. But such a classification of 

 the lowest living forms, even if allowed to be scientifically 

 established, which is not yet the case, would not alter the 

 position I take ; viz., that as vegetables subtract from the air 

 and soils the elements of those organic compounds upon 

 which the animal feeds, and which he cannot himself form or 

 otherwise procure, it follows of necessity that the vegetable, 

 even according to the doctrine of evolution, must have been the 

 first living thing. 



17. Further, I contend that the doctrine of evolution makes 

 it necessary that the vegetable forms of life must have covered 

 the earth with verdure before the evolution of animal life ; 

 inasmuch as almost each animal in the world has its own plant, 

 or class of plants, upon which it feeds. 



18. Therefore all plants, or the greater part of them, must 

 have gone through their battles and struggles, and been selected 

 and become species before the animals which feed upon them 

 Avere evolved, or the latter would have been starved. 



Mr. Martiiieaii, Mind in Nature, p. 22, say.s : " If you retain the forces 

 ill their plurahty, then you must assume them all among your data, and 

 confess, with one of the greatest living expositors of the phenomena of 

 development, that unless among your primordial elements you scatter already 

 the germs of mind as well as the inferior elements, the evolution never can 

 be brought out.'' 



Lotra"t, 2Iikrolo6mu.3, bk. iv. kap. 2, band ii. 33 et seq. 



