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Updated: June 18, 2025
If we divide into a hundred equal parts the whole period of the history of life, from the spontaneous generation of the first Monera to the present day, and if we then represent the relative duration of the five chief sections or ages, as calculated from the average thickness of the strata they contain, as percentages of this, we get something like the following relation: Total : 100 : 0.
From the humblest Monera to the best endowed insects, and up to the most intelligent vertebrates, the progress realized has been above all a progress of the nervous system, coupled at every stage with all the new constructions and complications of mechanism that this progress required.
At the commencement of it the oldest and simplest organisms were formed by spontaneous generation the Monera, with which the history of life on our planet opened. During this period the whole of the invertebrate ancestors of the human race were evolved from the unicellular organisms.
For instance, rose and apple-tree, elder and ash, wolf and dog, goat and sheep, ape and man, are not only a great deal farther removed from the mode of existence of inorganic bodies than the algæ, the monera, and other low organisms, but they have also, in spite of the great interval which separates them from one another and especially which separates man from every animal, much more numerous and important points of contact than, for instance, two families or genera of algæ or of mosses, of polyps or of infusoria, have among one another.
The Monera are but tiny bits of slimy, jelly-like substances mere specks of glue without organs of any kind, and yet they exercise the organic phenomena of life, such as nutrition, reproduction, sensation and movement, all of which are usually associated with an organized structure.
These Monera are therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, 'organisms without organs, or even in a strict philosophical sense they might not even be called organisms, since they possess no organs and since they are not composed of various particles.
Spontaneous generation, in the definite and restricted sense in which I maintain it, and claim that it is a necessary hypothesis in explaining the origin of life, refers solely to the evolution of the Monera from inorganic carbon-compounds.
He at once drew the origin of man also into the course of reasoning on the new theory, and sustained the theory by the discovery of the monera and other low organisms of one cell, as well as by special investigations of the calcareous sponges.
Thus he establishes a third primary division of the living world, distinct from both animals and plants, under the name of the Protista, to include the Myxomycetes, the Diatomaceae, and the Labyrinthulae, which are commonly regarded as plants, with the Noctilucae, the Flagellata, the Rhizopoda, the Protoplasta, and the Monera, which are most generally included within the animal world.
By this important differentiation of the plasson into nucleus and cell-body, the organised cell was evolved from the structureless cytode, the nucleated from the unnucleated plastid. That the first cells to appear on the earth were formed from the Monera by such a differentiation seems to us the only possible view in the present condition of science.
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