Of the earliest plant cells, developed by spontaneous generation in the primordial epoch, some developed tails, or projected filaments of protoplasm from their jelly-like bodies. With these tails they propelled themselves through the primeval seas, and thus separated themselves from the plants and became animals. In this earliest epoch of life’s history all beings lived in the water. These primitive plants possessed as much soul and mind as the animals that thus branched off from them, and all plants still possess soul and mind. But I am sorry to say that my ancestor, who thus projected a tail and became an animal, was a degenerate, a lazy loafer, a robber, a murderer and a cannibal. We all have to live on protoplasm. The plants made their own living plasm, manufacturing it from inorganic matter, but the animals were too indolent to do such laborious work, when they could just as well kill and eat the plant cells and subsist on them. In this way they lost the recipe for making plasm, and we descendants are consequently born cannibals, condemned to rob, murder, despoil and eat our fellow beings, or starve. My next beautiful ancestor, to whom I will introduce you, was an animal consisting of numerous cells arranged in the form of a sack or stomach, called a blastoderm or gastraea. There was no central brain at this time, each cell having a brain of its own. Yesterday, while patrolling my beat down in the mine, in a drift in the limestone, the earliest sedimentary deposit laid down on the bed of the primeval ocean, I found the house of my archaic ancestor, willed to me by him millions of years ago, and delivered by him to me yesterday. It is a minute shell, with which he protected his precious stomach. This stomach took its flight to Heaven in the earliest dawn of time, but the house, one of the many mansions of the soul, preserved intact came down to me through unnumbered ages, while myriad races came into being and faded into eternity, and religions sprang up and flourished and waned, and empires rose and rotted and fell. In the next stage, the stomach has become elongated, and the nerve centre or spinal cord makes its appearance along the whole length of the body. At this period my beloved grandfather was a very aristocratic and exclusive worm, belonging to one of the first families, and, like them, had as much brains in his tail as in his head, for no cranial brain had yet developed. The remaining steps of the evolution, through which my ancestors have passed, are depicted in the development of the human embryo, and I will ask you to read up on the subject of embryology, which I have found quite as interesting as dime novels. Transcriber's Notes