936. Everywhere, where the three elements cooperate, are infusoria present—thus upon the sea-shore, the tide-mark or strand, and shallow watery places.
937. The infusorium is a galvanic point, a galvanic vesicle, a galvanic column or chain.
938. In every infusorium there is triplicity of the poles, or properly speaking, of the processes. Each one maintains itself by the nutritive, digestive, and respiratory process, or what amounts to the same, the infusorial globule of mucus assumes a figure, its peculiar fluidity is formed in its interior, and it becomes oxydized. As is well known, no infusorium can live without moisture, and none if the access of air having been prevented, or the water boiled, it is freed from the air and the Earthy.
939. If the organic fundamental substance consist of infusoria, so must the whole organic world originate from infusoria. Plants and animals can only be metamorphoses of infusoria.
940. This being granted, so also must all organizations consist of infusoria, and during their destruction dissolve into the same. Every plant, every animal is converted by maceration into a mucous mass; this putrefies, and the moisture is stocked with infusoria.
941. Putrefaction is nothing else than a division of organisms into infusoria, a reduction of the higher to the primary, life.
942. Organisms are a synthesis of infusoria. Their generation is none other than an accumulation of infinitely numerous mucous points, infusoria. In these the organisms have not forsooth been at once wholly and perfectly depicted as on the smallest scale, nor contained in a state of preformation; but they are only infusorial vesicles, that by different combinations assume different forms, and grow up into higher organisms.
THEORY OF GENERATION.
943. The theory of generation is in this sense a synthetical and epigenetic, not an analytic.
944. The theory of preformation contradicts the laws of nature's development.