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For this reason the natural history of the Monera is of great interest; here alone can we find the means to overcome the chief difficulties of the problem of spontaneous generation. The actual living Monera are specimens of such organless or structureless organisms, as they must have boon formed by spontaneous generation at the commencement of the history of life.
To put his views into a few words, he conceives that all forms of life originally commenced as Monera, or simple particles of protoplasm; and that these Monera originated from not-living matter. Some of the Monera acquired tendencies towards the Protistic, others towards the Vegetal, and others towards the Animal modes of life. The last became animal Monera.
A German naturalist recognized among lower animals one group whose distinctive characteristic was that they were made of cells without nucleii, giving the name Monera to the group.
The plant-branch begins with the sea-weeds, and passes on to the fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, pines and palm-ferns, grasses, etc., then to the trees, shrubs and herbs. The animal-branch begins with the monera, or single-cell forms, which are little more than a drop of sticky, glue-like protoplasm. Then it passes on to the amoebae, which begins to show a slight difference in its parts.
And then comes the highest, Man, from the Kaffir, Bush-man, Cave-man, and Digger Indian, up through the many stages until the highest forms of our own race are reached. From the Monera to Man is a long path, containing many stages, but it is a path including all the intermediate forms.
The state of unorganized protoplasm which Haeckel named the Monera, that precedes the development of that architect of life, the cell, can hardly be more than one remove from inert matter. By insensible molecular changes and transformations of energy, the miracle of living matter takes place.
Thus we come to the last, or, if you prefer, the first, question in connection with evolution the question of the origin of the Monera. This is the real question of the origin of life, or of spontaneous generation. The famous botanist Nageli afterwards developed the same ideas.
At the same time he pointed out that our hypothesis of spontaneous generation is "a necessary condition for understanding nature according to the law of causality." I repeat that we must call in the aid of the hypothesis only as regards the Monera, the structureless "organisms without organs." Every complex organism must have been evolved from some lower organism.
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that while the ordinary cells of the higher animal body resemble the monera in many ways, still the white corpuscles in the blood of man and the animals bear a startling resemblance to the amoebae so far as regards size, general structure, and movements, and are in fact known to Science as "amoeboids."
Haekel says of the Monera: "The Monera are the simplest permanent cytods. Their entire body consists of merely soft, structureless plasm. However thoroughly we may examine them with the help of the most delicate reagents and the strongest optical instruments, we yet find that all the parts are completely homogeneous.
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