s
manifestation of force and energy in such growth and development. One
may see the life force in the plant pressing forth for expression and
manifestation, from the first sprouting of the seed, until the last
vital action on the part of the mature plant or tree.

Besides the vital action observable in the growth and development of
plants, we know, of course, that plants sicken and die, and manifest
all other attributes of living forms. There is no room for argument
about the presence of life in the plant kingdom.

But there are other forms of life far below the scale of the plants.
There is the world of the bacteria, microbes, infusoria--the groups of
cells with a common life--the single cell creatures, down to the
Monera, the creatures lower than the single cells--the Things of the
slime of the ocean bed.

These tiny Things--living Things--present to the sight merely a tiny
speck of jelly, without organs of any kind. And yet they exercise all
the functions of life--movement, nutrition, reproduction, sensation,
and dissolution. Some of these elementary forms are all stomach, that
is they are all one organ capable of performing all the functions
necessary for the life of the animal. The creature has no mouth, but
when it wishes to devour an object it simply envelopes it--wraps itself
around it like a bit of glue around a gnat, and then absorbs the
substance of its prey through its whole body.

Scientists have turned some of these tiny creatures inside out, and yet
they have gone on with their life functions undisturbed and untroubled.
They have cut them up into still tinier bits, and yet each bit lived on
as a separate animal, performing all of its functions undisturbed. They
are all the same all over, and all the way through. They reproduce
themselves by growing to a certain size, and then separating into two,
and so on. The rapidity of the increase is most remarkable.

Haekel says of the Monera: "The Monera are the simplest permanent
cytods. Their entire body consists of merely soft, structureless plasm.
However thoroughly we may examine them with the help of the most
delicate reagents and the strongest optical instruments, we yet find
that all the parts are completely homogeneous. 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