250 
and sucli a destiny lias been the faith and hope of millions of 
the human family in all ages^ and the teaching of not a few of 
the profoundest scholars of their day. 
Now^ however, we are called upon to give up this faith 
in man^s noble descent^ and accept — at the risk of being 
considered unscientific — the dictum of the German professor, 
Ernst Haeckel, and believe that man has been evolved out of 
the monera, to hold that There is no doubt that man is 
descended from an extinct mammalian form, which, if we could 
see it, we should certainly class with the apes ; and It is 
equally certain that this primitive ape in turn descended from 
an unknown semi-ape, and the latter from an extinct pouched 
animal.^^ * And this, again, from another unlike creature, and 
so on by successive steps backward until the first shapeless, 
structureless mass of protoplasm is reached which was, we are 
told, the true ancestor of man. 
Now, since the views of the German professor on the sub- 
ject of evolution are held by many scientists of our own 
country in the present day, and are used by some to disprove 
the Bible account of man^s origin, it will be well to examine 
the subject carefully, and test the hypothesis both by common 
sense and by the teaching of modern science. 
In the first place, it will be necessary to examine the 
foundation on which the hypothesis rests. Man, says the 
professor, has descended from the monera. Well ! But from 
whence the monera ? Now note the answer : — When ani- 
mated bodies first appeared on our planet, previously without 
life, there must, in the first place, have been formed, by a 
process purely mechanical, from purely inorganic carbon com- 
binations, that very complex nitrogenised carbon compound 
which we call plasson, or ^ primitive slime,^ and which is the 
oldest material substance in which vital activities are embodied. 
In the lowest depths of the sea such homogeneous amorphous 
protoplasm probably still lives in its simplest character, under 
the name of bathybius. Each individual living particle of 
this structureless mass is called a monern. The oldest monera 
originated in the sea by spontaneous generation, just as 
crystals form in the matrix.’^ f 
After declaring that the doctrine of spontaneous generation 
cannot be experimentally refuted, and admitting that it cannot 
be experimentally proved, the professor goes on to say,J ^^He, 
however, who does not assume a spontaneous generation of 
* The Evolution of Man, vol. ii., p. 26. 
X Ihid., p. 32. 
t IbicL, p. 31. 
