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A mere collection of words has no skeleton. Instead of comparing with a mammal at the top of the organic scale, it is like a formless, undifferentiated protozoon at the bottom. As an example of a skeleton, here are the notes of the lecture with which I closed the season at the Garrick in May, 1907: SOCIALISM AND MODERN ETHICAL SCIENCE The general confusion on this question.
They go about their business with an enviable singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and drunk, and attained to the fulness of life, they divide and begin again with renewed zest the pastime of living. In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at this matter in another light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains.
What we learn from biology is, that it is the constant effort of nature to combine cells into individuals and individuals into societies the protozoon, in other words, evolves into the animal, the animal into what some have called the 'hyper-zoon, or super-organism. Well, now, to this physical evolution corresponds a psychical one.
Just as a protozoon is almost wholly composed of albuminoid gelatine, while a mammal is composed of tissues widely varying in kind, in the same way a tribe of primitive savages, without a chief, is composed simply of a few families and the aggregation is the result of mere material propinquity, while a civilized society of the historical or contemporaneous period is made up of social classes which differ, the one from the other, either through the physio-psychical constitutions of their component members, or through the whole of their customs and tendencies, and their personal, family or social life.
And in all cases in the humblest alga as in the oak, in the protozoon as in the mammal this fertilized germ results from the union of the contents of two cells.
There are no waste parents, which should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state that so bothers your mortal man.
Utilizing his wide range of zoological and anatomical knowledge, he constructed a hypothetical tree of descent or, if you prefer, ascent from the root in a protozoon to the topmost twig or most recent offshoot, man. From that day till this Haeckel's persistent labors have been directed towards the perfection of that genealogical tree.
That is to say, every mammal, for example, originating in an egg stage, when it is comparable to a protozoon, passes through successive stages when it is virtually in succession a gastrula, a fish, and an amphibian before it attains the mammalian status, because its direct ancestors were in succession, through the long geological ages, protozoons, gastrulae, fishes, amphibians before the true mammal was evolved.
That by any series of changes a protozoon should ever become a mammal, seems to those who are not familiar with zoology, and who have not seen how clear becomes the relationship between the simplest and the most complex forms when intermediate forms are examined, a very grotesque notion.
Mr. Mivart then quotes from Mr. Murphy whose work I have not seen the following passage: Suppose that it has taken five hundred years to form the greyhound out of his wolf-like ancestor. This is a mere guess, but it gives the order of magnitude. Now, if so, how long would it take to obtain an elephant from a protozoon or even from a tadpole-like fish?
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