we are driven to assume either that it was produced by some unknown intelligent power in its present condition of complex adjustment, or to assume that it has had a long history of building by successive steps, just as we have seen to be the case with the higher organisms.  The latter assumption is, of course, in harmony with the general trend of thought.  To-day protoplasm is produced only from other protoplasm; but, plainly, the first protoplasm on the earth must have had a different origin.  We must therefore next look for facts which will enable us to understand its origin.  We have seen that the animal and plant machines have been built up from the simple cell as the result of its powers acting under the ordinary conditions of nature.  Now, in accordance with this general line of thought, we shall be compelled to assume that previous to the period of building machinery which we have been considering, there was another period of machine building during which this cell machine was built by certain natural forces.

But here we are forced to stop, for nothing which we yet know gives even a hint as to the method by which this machine was produced.  We have, however, seen that there are forces in nature efficient in building machines, as well as those for producing chemical compounds; and this, doubtless, suggests to us that there may be similar forces at work in building protoplasm.  If we can find natural forces by which the simplest bit of living matter can be built up into a complicated machine like the ox, with its many delicately adjusted parts, it is certainly natural to imagine that the same forces may have built this simpler machine with which we started.  But such a conclusion is for a simple reason impossible.  We have seen that the essential factor in this machine building is reproduction, with the correlated powers of variation and heredity.  Without these forces we could not have advanced in this machine building at all.  But these properties are themselves the result of the machinery of protoplasm.  We have no reason for thinking that this property of reproduction can occur in any other object in nature except this protoplasmic machine.  Of course, then, if reproduction is the result of the structure of protoplasm we can not use this factor in explaining the origin of this protoplasm.  The powers of the completed machine can not be brought forward to account for its origin.  Thus the one fundamental factor for machine building is lacking, and if we are to explain nature’s method of producing protoplasm from simpler structures, we must either suppose that the parts of the cell are capable of reproduction and subject to heredity, or we must look for some other method.  Such a road has however not yet been found, nor have we any idea in what direction to look.  But the fact that nature has methods of machine building, as we have seen, may hold out the possibility that some day we may discover her method of building this primitive living machine, the cell.