THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2360, 3 May 1901, Page 3

THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

A Startling Discovery, Professor Wilhelm Boelsche, of the University of Leipsic, Germany, claims to have discovered the secret of the origin of human life. After years of close study and investigation, he has come to the conclusion that the first organ of life to be formed was the stomach, and that t!;e first animal was all stomach. In a paper which he has just written the professor shows the evolutions through which the stomach has gone—becoming a less and less prominent part of the animal as the specie." developed towards the higher orders. A particularly interesting fact that Professor Boelsche brings out aikd emphasises in that the minute round ceil is the foundation of all life ; that a man is simply a mass of cells, which, however, assume all the forms of llesh, skin, and bones, and carry all the functions of the body.

Almost any one looking at the stomach of a goose knows that its purpose is the* reception and digestion of food, but there his knowledge ends. He does not know that the walls of the stomach, which he would call " flesh," consists of a series of cells. The cell is the real original being, and all higher creatures are nothing but the associated development of a number of cells. Man is but ah enormous "state" of millions on millions of cells, the original creatures. The elementary organism, then, behind all living things, which existed on earth millions of years ago wae a cell creature, a single cell. That no such animal is found now does not, the professor argues, prove anything to the contrary, for it is axiomatic with evolution that the earlier and simpler types die out altogether as they give way to the higher developments. Yet we see something Uke this original animal in the so-called infusoria of every street puddle or country marsh, or in the bacillus, consisting sometimes of a single cell, which multiplies by dividing itself. Man is merely a problem in addition or multiplication of cells. But this is only one side of the question. There is also a special line of evolution in the division of labour among the multiplied cells. The cells of the mass gather in groups, for this division of labour, and each group does nothing but its special work. This is the secret of the development of the organs of higher organisms or creatu res.