in its first stages of living form operates in dense darkness, and the first life upon the planet began and perfected itself in the age when midnight gloom enveloped the globe. "The Supreme Power," says the author of "Planetary Evolution," "wrought out its purpose with no eye to discern its workings and no helpless ignorance to dictate what was needed to make a world." The deep-sea soundings show that life still exists there without the aid of sunlight and that there is no limit to the domain of organic life. And the necessity exists even at this age for darkness during the formative processes of embryonic life.
All microscopic life embodies the essential characteristics of activity and form that distinguish many of the distinct types of animal and vegetable life. The mould that gathers upon decaying bread is a great forest when sufficiently magnified. The wiggling animalculæ in the stagnant water is but a prototype of the writhing serpent of the Brazilian forest. In these two types of minute organic being we see the first stages of life in planetary formation. And the induced electric energy on the animalculine organism compelled it to both growth and activity, and, obedient to that principle, it added cell to cell in any direction that that electric energy in that form sought relief, thus producing different types of organic structure. The influence of the pent-up currents of electric energy was destined to have a moulding power upon the higher types of organic life, for their influence upon the living form soon became manifest in the construction of nerve-tissue, which is the basis of all animal structure, and the beginning of all embryotic form, and is essentially the same in all organic life.
All attempts of science to formulate a theory of the source of life end in an abstraction. To teach that life originates in a germ leads to an analysis that shows the germ is a compound form itself, and one of the stages of incipient life. The advocate of the cell as the primitive source of life soon discovers that the cell is the result of chemical forces that have not yet arrived at the germ state, and that both the germ and the cell are but successive stages of life development, and we must go further back into the realm of the invisible electro-magnetic forces for the true source of physical life. Here the untrained intellect is bewildered and is unable to discern any relation of force beyond the physical senses, and science and reasoning causation must explore the invisible realities, and realms of force beyond the physical senses, which requires the highest order of mental training. It is in the mental realm, the realm of spirit and electricity, that we must seek the solution of all the higher problems of life and destiny.
In the spermatozoa of the male is the first evolution of the organic life of the planet. It is the electro-chemical combination of elements in which the primitive cell was formed, and in nature's corresponding environment it goes steadily forward through all previous stages until perfected in form, and becomes a miniature production of its parent structure. It thus unconsciously followed the forces and elements of the parent organism whereby that parent organism came into being from its parent, and so on backward for generations and ages. And in order to perfect the power of sex to the highest degree and preserve the life of the race, there was a differentiation in the embryonic state, whereby one organism, the male, became the power to preserve the energy, while the other, the female, became the environment to perfect the form.
This was no miracle, but a response of the organism to the waves of electric power in the planet, which at times and conditions would be more positive or negative in their electric energy. For all the elements of life and the universe animate and inanimate are sexual, male or female, positive or negative, in their natural relations.
The higher types of life are almost wholly dependent upon the arrangement of the cells on a high electric tension, and the early forms were almost wholly of nerve-tissue structures, and the primitive animalculæ followed the law of differentiation and were able to construct muscular fiber and bone formation, and became the fish and reptiles that inhabited the ancient seas.
The processes of planetary formation are resultants of electrical action among the elements that form the planet, and here is the true field of scientific research for the knowledge of causation as expressed through world construction. To the chemist and electrician belong the task of explaining the processes of world building as well as the secrets of life itself, and they must be found in the laws that control the electro-magnetic ether that permeates all atoms and space.
In the paleozoic age there were surging tides of electric energy through the planet itself, producing induced currents in all the forming bodies upon its surface. And these primitive currents swept the cell-formations into lines parallel with their lines of force the same as crystallizations, and as they were floating in circumambient water, the cells took the form of tissue structure, forming organs that followed the crystalline law of self preservation, and, in response to changing electric currents, throwing out new cell-structures.
Nerve tissue is the highest form of atomic balance that is visible, and the true basis of form structure that has vitality to meet the shifting electric currents. The tiny cells joined themselves to form new structures to respond to the electric waves, while the lower magnetic induction of the planet sent its power over the new tissue to hold it in form so that the organism could be partially permanent in form in its new environment. In this manner the organism grew and expanded from the primitive animalcular nerve type to the consolidated, firm tissue that enabled it to hold itself from dissolution under adverse conditions and planetary changes. The action of electric force in building secondary forms with a magnetism of their own is one of the most wonderful exhibitions of nature.
And now comes a startling result of this type of energy that has called living organism into being from the lower grades of atomic life. The cells that have formed themselves around a central point, as in the crystalline state, begin to quiver and vibrate with a strong rapidity that defies all power of restraint. In them is to be seen a new relation of the elements that grade still higher in the scale of atomic action. They have risen in the power of sensitiveness above the plane of receptive response to the swaying currents of the earth, and begin to send out currents of their own. Those currents penetrate the whole system with strange energy, and the organism begins to respond with new expressions of power. It moves with reference to the currents that it creates itself, and we have the first type of creation with a brain center governing the whole system.
That brain tissue is the result of the action indirect of the electric energy that is sweeping the planet in ceaseless lines of force and power. It sends its induced currents upon all the forming host of animalcular life floating in the dark waters, and some begin to grow brains.
The cellular structure ranges itself in line with the positive and negative polarity that made the crystalline form of the world a globe, and from that living cell-battery go out the currents that control the form by the inward force that ever after is to witness to the power of constructive energy to create living beings with sentient power to regulate and control their own destiny.
Meanwhile the surging tides of electric energy are forcing the continents upward, and the fish that swim in the paleozoic seas find the waters receding and himself part of the time on the land or in the mud and shallows, and the growing organism, from generation to generation becomes adapted to each condition of life on land and water. Then comes to pass the raising of the organism from the fish to the reptile by the influence of electrical induction and change of environment. Then also comes the growth of plant life, and the marvelous varieties of vegetation in the form of tree and shrub and grass. Upon the land, half submerged, the vegetation that had its rootlets in the former ocean bed grew from sea weeds into rank grasses and ferns, the types of which are seen to this day in the dense forests and jungles of the tropics.
In the early period of the paleozoic age the molusks, polyps, and marine plants were evolved without any reference to light whatever and depended on the sense of feeling to provide for the necessary food supplies to maintain their organism.
We have in the night-blooming cereus a flower that belonged in that epoch of the world's evolution when plants flowered and perfected their seed bearing in the dark. And in the salamander, beaver and hippopotamus a type of the amphibious animals of the early ages. We have in the bat a type of animal that
