Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/110

 lead one to the conclusion that Herr Duehring talks about things of which he knows very little and this conclusion becomes a certainty when we come to his proposal in the course of his writing on organic life (biology) to use the term "composition" instead of evolution. He who can make such a suggestion as that gives evidence that he is not acquainted with the building up of organic bodies.

All organic bodies, the very lowest excepted, develop from small cells by the increment of visible pieces of albumen with a central cell. The cell generally develops an outer skin and the contents are more or less fluid. The lowest cell-bodies develop from one cell; the enormous majority of organic beings are many-celled and among the lower forms these take on similar, and among the higher forms greater variations of, groupings and activities. In the human body for example are bones, muscles, nerves, sinews, ligaments, cartilage, skin, all either made up of cells or originating in them. But for all organic bodies, from the amœba which is a simple and for the most part unprotected piece of albumen with a cell centre in the midst to man, and from the smallest one-celled desmidian to the highest developed plant, the mode is one and the same by which the cells propagate themselves, that is by division. The cell centre is first laced across its midst, the lacing which separates the centre into two knobs becomes stronger and stronger and at last they become separated and two cell centres are formed. The same occurrence takes place in the cell itself. Each of the cell centres becomes the middle point of a collection of cell stuff which by knitting ever closer becomes combined with the other, and finally both of them part and live on as separate cells. Through such repeated cell divisions the full sized animal gradually develops from the germ of the animal egg after