Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/104

 the end of the thread of ancestry is reached, or the original vegetable form."

The statement that Darwin traced all existing organisms from one original germ is to put it politely a piece of pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring. Darwin says distinctly on the last page of the Origin of Species, Sixth Edition, that he regards all living beings not as separate creations but as the descendants in a direct line from some fewer beings and Haeckel makes a distinct advance on this ascribes "an entirely distinct source for plants and another for the animal kingdom" and on and between both of them "a number of original stems each of which has developed independently from one single primary monistic form." (History of Creation page 397.) This original form of life Herr Duehring discovers solely to bring it into contempt by paralleling it with the first man according to Jewish tradition, Adam. Here, unfortunately for Herr Duehring, he does not know how this original Jew turns out, according to Smith's Assyrian discoveries to have been the original Semite, and that the entire Biblical story of the Creation and the Flood has been shown to have been taken from a legendary store common to the Jews, Babylonians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.

It is brought forward as a severe and irrefutable reproach to Darwin that he is at an end where the thread of descent fails him. Unfortunately the whole of our science deserves the same reproach. When the thread of descent fails it it is "at an end." It has not yet come to the point of creating organic beings without an ancestry, not even once has it been able to make simple protoplasm or other albuminous bodily forms out of the chemical elements. It can only say therefore with any any certainty regarding the origin of life, that it must