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 
he endowed with a potentiality by which it would evolve into 
all the known living forms in the world.* 
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 Protamoabse previously 
alluded to (para. 5), as well as fungi; all the well-known forms 
of Amoebae, — the Noctiluca, which produce phosphorescence 
of the sea; and the Rhizopoda, 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 
were evolved, or the latter would have been starved. 
* Mr. Martineau, Mind in Nature , p. 22, says : “ If you retain the forces 
in their plurality, 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 
he brought out. ,; 
Lotra's Mikrokosmus, Lk. iv. kap. 2, band ii. 33 et seq. 
