class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 11]"/>

WAS MAN CREATED?

WHAT SCIENCE CAN ANSWER.

"The object of science is not to find out what we like or what we dislike—the object of science is Truth." In the discussion of the subject, "Was Man Created?" our object will be—not to study the many ways God might have created him, but the way he actually did create him, for all ways would be alike easy to an Omnipotent Being.

Let us look at man and ask the question: What is there about him which would need an independent act of creation any more than about the "mountain of granite or the atom of sand"? The answer comes back: Besides life, man has many mental attributes. Let us direct our attention at first to the grand phenomena of life, and then to man's attributes.

To discover the nature of life, to find out what life really is, it would be folly to commence by comparing man, the perfection of living beings, with an inorganic or inanimate substance like a brick, to discover the hidden secret; for, as Professor Orton says:[3] "That only is essential to life which is common to all forms of life. Our brains, stomach, livers, hands and feet are luxuries. They are necessary to make us human, but not living beings." Instead of man, then, it will be necessary for us to take the simplest being which possesses such a phenomena; and such are the little homogeneous specks of protoplasm, constituting the Group Monera, which are entirely destitute of structure, and to which the name "Cytode" has been given. In the fresh waters in the neighborhood of Jena minute lumps of protoplasm were discovered by Haeckel, which, on being examined under the most powerful lens of a microscope, were seen to have no constant form, their outlines being in a state of perpetual change, caused by the protrusion from various parts of their surface of broad lobes and thick finger-like projections, which, after remaining visible for a time, would be withdrawn, to make their appearance again on some other part of the surface. To this little mass of protoplasm Haeckel has given the name Protanæba primitiva. These little lumps multiply by spontaneous division into two pieces, which, on becoming dependent, increase in size and acquire all the characteristics of the parent. From this illustration, it will be seen that "reproduction is a form of nutrition and a growth of the individual to a size beyond that belonging to it as an individual, so that a part is thus elevated into a (new) whole."

It is to this simple state of the monera the fertilized egg of any animal is transformed—the germ vesicle; the original egg kernel disappears, and the parent kernel (cytococcus) forms itself anew; and it is in this condition, a non-nucleated ball of protoplasm, a true cytod, a homogeneous, structureless body, without different constituent parts, that the human child, as well as all other living beings, take their first steps in development. No matter how wonderful this may seem, the fact stares us in the face that the entire human child, as well as every animal with all their great future possibilities, are in their first stage a small ball of this complex homogeneous substance. Whether we consider "a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle which finds space and duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly, and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the gigantic pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference," or we look "at the other half of the world of life, picturing to ourselves the great finner whale, hugest of beasts that live or have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of bone, muscle, and blubber, with easy roll, among the waves in which the stoutest ship that ever left dock-yard would founder hopelessly, and contrast him with the invisible animalcule, mere gelatinous specks, multitudes of which could in fact dance upon the point of a needle with the same ease as the angels of the schoolman could in imagination;—with these images before our minds, it would be strange if we did not ask what community of form or structure is there between the fungus and the fig-tree, the animalcule and the whale? and, à fortiori, between all four? Notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity—namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition—does pervade the whole living world."[4] And this unit is Protoplasm. So we see it is necessary for us to retreat to our protoplasm as a naked formless plasma, if we would find freed from all non-essential complications the agent to which has been assigned the duty of building up structure and of transforming the energy of lifeless matter into the living. Even Goethe (in 1807) almost stated this when he said: "Plants and animals, regarded in their most imperfect condition, are hardly distinguishable. This much, however, we may say, that from a condition in which plant is hardly to be distinguished from animal, creatures have appeared, gradually perfecting themselves in two opposite directions—the plant is finally glorified into the tree, enduring and motionless; the animal into the human being of the highest mobility and freedom."

Let us examine for a moment this substance Protoplasm, and see in what way it differs from inorganic matter, or in what way the animate differs from the inanimate—the living from the dead.

Felix Dujardin, a French zoologist (1835) pointed out that the only living substance in the body of rhizopods and other inferior primitive animals, is identical with protoplasm. He called it sarcode. Hugo von Mohl (1846) first applied the name protoplasm to the peculiar serus and mobile substance in the interior of vegetable cells; and he perceived its high importance, but was very far from understanding its significance in relation to all organisms. Not, however, until Ferdinand Cohn (1850) and more fully Franz Unger (1855) had established the identity of the animate and contractile protoplasm in vegetable cells and the sarcode of the lower animals, could Max Shultz in 1856-61 elaborate the protoplasm theory of the sarcode so as to proclaim protoplasm to be the most essential and important constituent of all organic cells, and to show that the bag or husk of the cell, the cellular membrane and intercellular substance, are but secondary parts of the cell, and are frequently wanting. In a similar manner Lionel Beale (1862) gave to protoplasm, including the