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Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the imagination. Not merely in such objects as the pebble, whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faithfully, sketched; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land.
The reefs of the Pacific, the deep-sea soundings of the Atlantic, show that it is to the slow-growing coral and to the imperceptible animalcule, which lives its brief space and then adds its tiny shell to the muddy cairn left by its brethren and ancestors, that we must look as the agents in the formation of limestone and chalk, and not to hypothetical oceans saturated with calcareous salts and suddenly depositing them.
And it may be asked what advantage, as far as we can see, would it be to an infusorian animalcule to an intestinal worm or even to an earth-worm, to be highly organised. If it were no advantage, these forms would be left, by natural selection, unimproved or but little improved, and might remain for indefinite ages in their present lowly condition.
But add a touch of chemistry, and he was interested. Chemistry leads up to life. He said he did not think he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes. It would be only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man had attained to.
How all living things on earth, including the endless variety of plants, and all the diversity of animals insects, fishes, birds, the ichthyosaurus, the mastodon, the mammoth, and man have descended from the primordial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted for by the operation of the following natural laws, viz.: First, the law of Heredity, or that by which like begets like.
Again, how astonishing on the creative, how natural on the evolutionary hypothesis, that the arrangement of bones in the hand of a man, the wing of a bat, the fin of a porpoise, the leg of a horse, should be precisely the same; the number of vertebræ in the neck of a giraffe, and in that of an elephant the same; the primitive germs from which a man, a dog, a frog, and a lobster are gradually evolved, to all appearance the same the same microscopic atom of homogeneous matter, undistinguishable by any known test from an animalcule almost at the bottom of the organic scale!
And, in fact, there are some green organisms, in every respect characteristically plants, such as Chlamydomonas, and the common Volvox, or so-called "Globe animalcule," which run through a cycle of forms of just the same simple character as those of Heteromita.
But there are still some cases where the little we know of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye, suggests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by the corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near the mouth of rivers.
Observe how, after feeding for a while, and increasing proportionately in size, one will divide itself in half, each half becoming a separate and complete animalcule, another line itself internally and clothe itself externally with clustered cells, which, by a series of differentiations, traceable through a number of animalcular varieties, eventually exhibit the outlines of respiratory and circulatory systems.
The assertion, that man's "first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule," even if we do not look to the potentiality of development into a higher being, which experience shows to exist in the human germ, but not in the infusorial, is a positive misstatement. The lowest monad has a mouth and means for propagating its kind, which do not belong to the primitive ovum of any higher animal.
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