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There are perhaps more than a million species of plants and animals, exclusive of the microscopic and infusory animalcules, now inhabiting the terraqueous globe, so that if only one of these were to become extinct annually, and one new one were to be every year called into being, much more than a million of years might be required to bring about a complete revolution of organic life.
Then it seems reasonable to believe, that the improved observations of future times will clear up the only remaining difficulty, and show how the infusory animalcules also are generated from beings of their own kind. These minute creatures are prolific to a degree that transcends all calculation; and they exist, either in the egg or maturely developed, in inconceivable numbers.
We have already seen that this nucleated vesicle is itself a type of mature and independent being in the infusory animalcules, as well as the starting point of the foetal progress of every higher individual in creation, both animal and vegetable.
These germs, multiplying themselves by fissiparous generation, will constitute a stock of animals of a low type, such as a tribe of infusory animalcules.
In view of facts like these, we may surely say, that the existence of the infusory animalcules, and even of the entozoa, is conceivable, supposing they could only have been produced by parents of their own kind, and without having recourse to the anomalous and hypothetical doctrine of equivocal generation.
The presence of free oxygen appeared to be one of the conditions of the existence of life, and of those singular changes in organic matters which are known as fermentation and putrefaction. The question of the generation of the infusory animalcules thus passed into a new phase.
Some sea-plants, zoöphytes, infusory animalcules, and a few of the molluscous tribe, all low down in the order of being, but important from their immense numbers and joint action, commenced their work of absorbing the carbonic acid with which the air was overcharged, and building up vast piers and mounds of stone from their own remains.
Further, it has been recently discovered by means of the microscope, that there is, as far as can be judged, a perfect resemblance between the ovum of the mammal tribes, during that early stage when it is passing through the oviduct, and the young of the infusory animalcules.
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