With Professor Schaefer there is first “the fortuitous production of life upon this globe”—­the chance meeting or jostling of the elements that resulted in a bit of living protoplasm, “or a mass of colloid slime” in the old seas, or on their shores, “possessing the property of assimilation and therefore of growth.”  Here the whole mystery is swallowed at one gulp.  “Reproduction would follow as a matter of course,” because all material of this physical nature—­fluid or semi-fluid in character—­“has a tendency to undergo subdivision when its bulk exceeds a certain size.”

“A mass of colloidal slime” that has the power of assimilation and of growth and reproduction, is certainly a new thing in the world, and no chemical analysis of it can clear up the mystery.  It is easy enough to produce colloidal slime, but to endow it with these wonderful powers so that “the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life” slumbers in it is a staggering proposition.

Whatever the character of this subdivision, whether into equal parts or in the form of buds, “every separate part would resemble the parent in chemical and physical properties, and would equally possess the property of taking in and assimilating suitable material from its liquid environment, growing in bulk and reproducing its like by subdivision.  In this way from any beginning of living material a primitive form of life would spread and would gradually people the globe.  The establishment of life being once effected, all forms of organization follow under the inevitable laws of evolution.”  Why all forms of organization—­why the body and brain of man—­must inevitably follow from the primitive bit of living matter, is just the question upon which we want light.  The proposition begs the question.  Certainly when you have got the evolutionary process once started in matter which has these wonderful powers, all is easy.  The professor simply describes what has taken place and seems to think that the mystery is thereby cleared up, as if by naming all the parts of a machine and their relation to one another, the machine is accounted for.  What caused the iron and steel and wood of the machine to take this special form, while in other cases the iron and steel and wood took other radically different forms, and vast quantities of these substances took no form at all?

In working out the evolution of living forms by the aid of the blind physical and chemical agents alone, Professor Schaefer unconsciously ascribes the power of choice and purpose to the individual cells, as when he says that the cells of the external layer sink below the surface for better protection and better nutrition.  It seems to have been a matter of choice or will that the cells developed a nervous system in the animal and not in the vegetable.  Man came because a few cells in some early form of life acquired a slightly greater tendency to react to an external stimulus.  In this way they were brought into closer touch with the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their duller neighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and developed the mind.