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Updated: May 20, 2025
The earliest unicellular organisms can only have been evolved from the simplest organisms we know, the Monera. These are the simplest living things that we can conceive. Their whole body is nothing but a particle of plasm, a granule of living albuminous matter, discharging of itself all the essential vital functions that form the material basis of life.
Among some of the lowest forms of unicellular organisms it is not known, but in most others some form of such union is universal.
Whether we consider the plant that multiplies by buds or the unicellular animal that simply divides into two equal parts, or the larger animal that multiplies by eggs, we find that in all cases the fundamental feature of the process is division. In all cases the organism divides into two or more parts, each of which becomes in time like the original.
It has descended from the Cyclostoma by a profound degeneration, and these in turn from the fishes; even the Ascidia and the whole of the Tunicates are merely degenerate fishes! Following out this curious theory, Dohrn came to contest the general belief that the Coelenterata and Worms are "lower animals"; he even declared that the unicellular Protozoa were degenerate Coelenterata.
It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times.
On December 10 we stopped the ship and secured her to a heavy floe from which we took in sufficient ice to make eight tons of fresh water, and whilst doing this Rennick sounded and obtained bottom in 1964 fathoms, fora-minifera and decomposed skeleton unicellular organs, also two pieces of black basic lava. Lillie and Nelson took plankton and water bottle samples to about 280 fathoms.
Thus, then, the chemical composition, as well as the structure and mode of division of these yellow cells, are those of unicellular algae, and I accordingly propose the generic name of Philozoon, and distinguish four species, differing slightly in size, color, mode of division, behavior with reagents, etc., for which the name of P. radiolarum, P. siphonophorum, P. actiniarum, and P. medusarum, according to their habitat, may be conveniently adopted.
Forms more generalized should be placed lower down on the ancestral tree, and must have had an earlier geological occurrence because they represented more nearly the ancestors of the higher. But this explains also the facts of embryonic development. According to Mr. Darwin's theory all the species of higher animals have developed from unicellular ancestors.
Later Consciousness in me takes no account of the category of time, and therefore all the partitions which tend to make of life a palace with a thousand rooms, do not exist in my case; I am still in the primitive unicellular state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego, and I feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance which they have individualized.
On Plates VII and VIII two kinds of unicellular organisms are shown, of one which the green algae is accustomed to live in light, the other the bacilli in darkness. These things are, of course, well-known facts. Our purpose here, however, is not merely to record them as 'fact', but, by re-creating them within ourselves, to use them to gain an experience of the function of the light-ether.
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