Cell Intelligence

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 4. THE LIVING STRUCTURES. The crust of the earth discloses to us like the leaves in a book an enormous number of animals and plants that have lived in the past but are now extinct and no more. Every layer and stratum is a page in the history of the life that has existed on this planet in the past....
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 4. THE LIVING STRUCTURES. The crust of the earth discloses to us like the leaves in a book an enormous number of animals and plants that have lived in the past but are now extinct and no more. Every layer and stratum is a page in the history of the life that has existed on this planet in the past. Just what was the cause of failure and its extermination in some cases is not easy to tell. However in the evolution of living structures, it is the same as in the evolution of other structures and those produced by man, the best will be retained and the inferior rejected. The discovery by some animals of how to make feathers with which to cover their bodies and wings with which to fly, was a great invention and improvement, which caused a great change in the flying animals. The living structures that have existed in the past show the same gradual evolution and improvement by new inventions and discoveries as the evolution of man from his savage state up to the present time. Mr. Haeckel states, Cells are grouped together under the idea of sculptors or builders because they alone in reality build the organisms. As to this fact, I agree with him, but I do not agree with him when he states that the cause of the building is only a chemical and mechanical force, and that it allcomes about by chance. The inorganic forces like electricity, heat, etc. do not produce anything for a purpose nor do rocks and dead matter produce machines or houses. Mr. Haeckel states: We notice the very remarkable fact that the egg cell in its original condition is so exactly the same in man as in all other animals that it is impossible to discover any essential difference. He gives the following figure 9 to illustrate this, and then he goes on and gives a description of the cell to show ...