Evolution by means of hybridization / by J.P. Lotsy.

  • Johannes Paulus Lotsy
Date:
1916
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Evolution by means of hybridization / by J.P. Lotsy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/186 (page 9)
    INTRODUCTION. 9 This means, that if the complete history of the earth couldbe compressed intojacourse of daily one-hour lectu¬ res lasting one and a half year, the life of a student — suppose he could begin attending them immediately after birth and continue to do so up to the comple¬ tion of his 8oth year — would be just sufficient to hear two seconds of these lectures. Once — or repeatedly — during this long, long pe¬ riod, Hving beings arose from much more complicated combinations of the elements also. Keen as this deduction may seem to be, in the face of the fact that generatio aequivoca has never yet been demonstrated, we are nevertheless forced to it. istly. because there has been a time in the history of the earth, during which life was impossible upon it. 2dly. because we know that no other elements occur in the living beings than in non-living nature, so that both are composed of the same substan¬ ces. 3dly. because we know that even at the present time, the majority of plants is able to transform large quantities of inorganic matter into living one. So we know f. i. that the whole body of a poplar is formed of inorganic matter, thus transformed by the wee little bit of living substance, once pre¬ sent in the seed which sprouted to form the poplar. Where we thus find that all bodies on earth, living as well as non-living ones, are built up by the same ele¬ ments, where we know furthermore that these very