1. The most remote ancestors of all living organisms were living beings of the simplest imaginable kind, organisms without organs, like the still existing _Monera_. Each consisted of a simple granule of protoplasm, a structureless mass of albuminous matter or plasson, like the recent Chromaceæ and Bacteriæ. The morphological value of these beings is not yet that of a cell, but that of a cytode, or cell without a nucleus. Cytoplasm and nucleus were still undifferentiated.
I assume that the first Monera owe their existence to spontaneous creation out of so-called anorganic combinations, consisting of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. An explanation of this hypothesis I have given in my 'Generelle Morphologie.'
The Monera probably arose early in the Laurentian period. The oldest are the Phytomonera, with vegetable metabolism. They possessed the power (characteristic of plants) of forming albumin by synthesis from carbon, water, and ammonia. From some of these plasma-forming Monera arose the plasmophagous Zoomonera with animal metabolism, living directly upon the produce of their plasmodomous or plasma-forming sisters. This is the first instance of the great principle of division of labour.
2. The second stage is that of the _simple and single cell_, a bit of protoplasm with a nucleus. Such unicellular organisms are still very common. The _Amoebæ_ are their simplest representatives. The morphological value of such beings is the same as that of the egg of any animal. The naked egg cells of the sponges creep about in an amoeboid fashion, scarcely distinguishable from Amoeba. The same remark applies to the egg-cell of man himself in its early stages before it is enclosed in a membrane. The first unicellular organisms arose from Monera through differentiation of the inner nucleus from the outer protoplasm.
3. Repeated division of the unicellular organism produces the _Synamoebium_, or community of Amoebæ, provided the divisional products, or new generations of the original cell, do not scatter, but remain together. The existence of such a _Coenobium_, a number of equal and only loosely-connected cells, as a separate stage in the ancestral history of animals, is made highly probable by the fact that the eggs of all animals undergo after fertilization such a process of repeated self-division, or 'cleavage,' until the single egg cell is transformed into a heap of cells closely packed together, not unlike a mulberry (_morula_)--hence _morula_ stage in ontogeny.