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Updated: May 25, 2025
Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck.
Given a small speck of jelly with some power of slightly varying its actions in accordance with slightly varying circumstances and desires given such a jelly-speck with a power of assimilating other matter, and thus of reproducing itself, given also that it should be possessed of a memory and a reproductive system, and we can show how the whole animal world can have descended it may be from an amoeba without interference from without, and how every organ in every creature is designed at first roughly and tentatively but finally fashioned with the most consummate perfection, by the creature which has had need of that organ, which best knew what it wanted, and was never satisfied till it had got that which was the best suited to its varying circumstances in their entirety.
One jelly-speck rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is now one; and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly, without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and which half the devoured and digested.
The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other; and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water.
The small round jelly-speck spreads itself out and envelops its food, so that the whole creature is now a stomach, and nothing but a stomach. Having digested its food, it again becomes a jelly-speck, and is again ready to turn part of itself into hand or foot as its next convenience may dictate.
Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man or elephant. So at least evolutionists say and of course they ought to know most about it. But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here. Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation: mind is concerned as truly as matter.
But it must not be supposed that an animal or plant has ever conceived the idea of some organ widely different from any it was yet possessed of, and has set itself to design it in detail and grow towards it. The small jelly-speck, which we call the amoeba, has no organs save what it can extemporise as occasion arises.
A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs?
When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing a bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic egg it proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly digesting and assimilating it afterwards.
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