" he adds, "ask any one to accord it the least confidence
on my word alone. But as surely it will happen, sooner or later,
that men on the one hand independent of prejudices even the most
widespread, and on the other profound observers of nature, may have
a glimpse of this truth, I am very content that we should know that
it is of the number of those views which, in spite of the prejudices
of my age, I have thought it well to accept."

"Why," he asks, "should not heat and electricity act on certain matters
under favorable conditions and circumstances?" He quotes Lavoisier as
saying (_Chemie_, i., p. 202) "that God in creating light had spread
over the world the principle of organization of feeling and of thought";
and Lamarck suggests that heat, "this mother of generation, this
material soul of organized bodies," may be the chief one of the means
which nature directly employs to produce in the appropriate kind of
matter an act of arrangement of parts, of a primitive germ of
organization, and consequently of vitalization analogous to sexual
fecundation.

"Not only the direct formation of the simplest living beings could
have taken place, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, but the
following considerations prove that it is necessary that such
germ-formations should be effected and be repeated under favorable
conditions, without which the state of things which we observe could
neither exist nor subsist."

His argument is that in the lower polyps (the Protozoa) there is no
sexual reproduction, no eggs. But they perish (as he strangely thought,
without apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the winter. How,
he asks, can they reappear? Is it not more likely that these simple
organisms are themselves regenerated? After much verbiage and
repetition, he concludes:

"We may conceive that the simplest organisms can arise from a minute
mass of substances which possess the following conditions--namely,
which will have solid parts in a state nearest the fluid conditions,
consequently having the greatest suppleness and only sufficient
consistence to be susceptible of constituting the parts contained in
it. Such is the condition of the most gelatinous organized bodies.

"Through such a mass of substances the subtile and expansive fluids
spread, and, always in motion in the milieu environing it,
unceasingly penetrate it and likewise dissipate it, arranging while
traversing this ma