to commence the series of expansions or disencasings,
culminating in the independent individual.

The "epigenesists" held that both the germ and its subsequent organs
were built up of juxtaposed molecules according to the operation of a
developmental force, or "nisus formations."

At the present day the question may seem hardly worth the paper on which
it is referred to. Nevertheless, "pre-existence of germs" and evolution
are logically inseparable from the idea of species by primary
miraculously-created individuals. Cuvier, therefore, maintained both as
firmly as did Haller. In the debates of 1830 I remained the thrall of
that dogma in regard to the origin of single-celled organisms whether in
or out of body. Every result of formfaction, I believed, with most
physiologists, to be the genetic outcome of a pre-existing "cell." The
first was due to miraculous interposition and suspension of ordinary
laws; it contained potentially all future possible cells.
Cell-development exemplified evolution of pre-existing germs, the
progeny of the primary cell. They progagated themselves by
self-division, or by "proliferation" of minutes granules or atoms,
which, when properly nourished, again multiplied by self-division, and
grew to the likeness of the parent cells.

It seems to me more consistent with the present phase of dynamical
science and the observed graduations of living things to suppose the
sarcode or the "protogenal" jelly-speck should be formable through the
concurrence of conditions favouring such combination of their elements,
and involving a change of force productive of their contractions and
extensions, molecular attractions, and repulsions--and the sarcode has
so become, from the period when its irrelative repetitions resulted in
the vast indefinite masses of the "eozoon," exemplifying the earliest
process of "formification" or organic crystallisation--than that all
existing sarcodes or "protogenes" are the result of genetic descent from
a germ or cell due to a primary act of miraculous interposition.

I prefer, while indulging in such speculations, to consider the various
daily nomogeneously developed forms of protozoal or protistal jellies,
sarcodes, and single-celled organisms, to have been as many roots from
which the higher grades have ramified than that the origin of the whole
organic creation is to be referred, as the Egyptian priests did that of
the universe, to a single egg.

Amber or steel, when magn