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The Seventh Lesson: Cosmic Evolution.817
the inner. By so doing we will have a fuller idea of the process than if we
ignored the outer and proceed at once to the inner. Despise not the outer
form, for it has always been, and is now, the Temple of the Soul, which the
latter is remodelling and rebuilding in order to accommodate its constantly
increasing needs and demands.
Let us begin with the Protozoa, or one-celled forms—the lowest form of
animal life. The lowest form of this lowest class is that remarkable creature
that we have mentioned in previous lessons—the Moneron. This creature
lives in water, the natural element in which organic life is believed to have
had its beginning. It is a very tiny, shapeless, colorless, slimy, sticky mass—
something like a tiny drop of glue—alike all over and in its mass, and without
organs or parts of any kind. Some have claimed that below the field of the
microscope there may be something like elementary organs in the Moneron,
but so far as the human eye may discover there is no evidence of anything of
the kind. It has no organs or parts with which to perform particular functions,
as is the case with the higher forms of life. These functions, as you know,
may be classed into three groups, i.e., nutrition, reproduction, and relation—
that is, the function of feeding, the function of reproducing its kind, and
the function of receiving and responding to the impressions of the outside
world. All of these three classes of functions the Moneron performs—but
with any part of its body, or with all of it.
Every part, or the whole, of the Moneron absorbs food and oxygen—it
is all mouth and lungs. Every part, or the whole, digests the food—it is all
stomach. Every part, or the whole, performs the reproductive function—it
is all reproductive organism. Every part of it senses the impressions from
outside, and responds to it—it is all organs of sense, and organs of motion.
It envelops its prey as a drop of glue surrounds a particle of sand, and
then absorbs the substance of the prey into its own substance. It moves by
prolonging any part of itself outward in a sort of tail-like appendage, which it
uses as a “foot,” or “finger” with which to propel itself; draw itself to, or push
itself away from an object. This prolongation is called a pseudopod, or “false-