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There is life infinitely lower and more minute than any which our most powerful microscopes reveal to us, but let us leave this upon one side and begin with the amoeba.
When we come a little higher than the amoeba, we find organisms which consist of several cells, and a specialization of function begins to appear. As we ascend in the animal scale, specialization of structure and of function is found continually advancing, and the various kinds of cells are grouped together into colonies or organs. Cells and the Human Organism.
Even in the case of the biological unit like Amoeba, which is entirely solitary and unrelated to other individuals of its kind excepting in so far as it is a link in the chain of successive generations, any vital activity can be called good or bad, right or wrong.
Will those grandsons in turn have descendants who will sail through the void, discover the foci of forces, the means to control them, and learn how to marshal the planets and grapple with space? Would it after all be any more startling than our rise from the slime? No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any of his most remote children would build and run dynamos.
We observe this in our own case; and we know that animals have great powers of communicating their ideas to one another, though their manner of doing this is as incomprehensible by us as a plant's knowledge of chemistry, or the manner in which an amoeba makes its test, or a spider its web, without having gone through a long course of mathematics.
He stated dogmatically that the amoeba and the other denizens of space absorbed all the ultra-violet light which fell on them and reflected only the visible rays which could not pass through the heaviside layer because of the lack of a synchronized carrier wave of shorter wave-length.
He stood up and winked at Jeffers. "And thanks for listening while I bent your ear." "Any time at all, ol' amoeba. And if you ever feel you need some advice from an ol' married man, why you just trot right round, and I'll give you plenty of bad advice." "At least you're honest," Mike said. "Night."
In the animal kingdom we find analogous progress. From mere unorganized groups of cells, or cell-like bodies, we ascend to groups of such cells arranged into parts that have different duties. The common Polype, from the substance of which may be separated cells that exhibit, when detached, appearances and movements like those of a solitary Amoeba, illustrates this stage.
Moreover, it is more clever of the terebella to have made itself the limbs with which it can work, than of the amoeba to be able to work without the limbs; and perhaps it is more sensible also to want a less elaborate dwelling, provided it is sufficient for practical purposes.
Wherever there is life there is a moral government of rewards and punishments understood by the amoeba neither better nor worse than by man. The history of organic development is the history of a moral struggle.
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