CHAPTER I
Origin of Plants
“’Tis a quaint thought, and yet perchance,
Sweet blossoms, ye have sprung
From flowers that over Eden once
Their pristine fragrance flung.”
“In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light!”
There is no greater mystery than the mystery of creation. Nowhere is its story told more eloquently and more scientifically than in the opening words of Genesis. All the fruitage of centuries of research but reaffirms this ancient narrative.
In the early days of this planet, when its crust was scarcely hardened from the molten state, there reigned what might be called the age of water. The entire surface of the globe was covered with a sea of restless, moving liquid, overcharged with a heavy atmosphere of vapour, so dense that not a single ray of light could penetrate it. As the process of cooling went on, more and more moisture condensed out of the air, until finally the first ray of light reached the universal sea and terrestrial day began.
Here in this dim, watery world, about the time that the first land began to emerge from the deep, by some divine, mysterious agency, the first life was born.
No doubt it was one-celled, free-moving, and like modern Flagellates, partaking of the nature of both plant and animal.
Slowly, and in response to evolutionary promptings, simple aquatic plant forms began to develop from the primary single cells. Animal life may have begun a simultaneous development, but if it did, it did not become strong enough to make any impress on the geologic rock from which we draw our data.
Certainly the plants were in the ascendency. The mobile green Algae were characteristic of the time. It is a remarkable thing that though they are probably the progenitors of all that vast world of vegetable life which enriches the world today, the Algae have always gone on reproducing their own kind. Today we can watch, under a microscope, the activities of the first form of terrestrial life, born incalculable aeons ago.
Mayhap the earth would be peopled exclusively by Algae and similar forms today, if it had not been for a prehistoric accident. One day, the water suddenly receded from a bit of land and left some Algae in the mud behind it. Now, the Algae had always been used to plenty of water and they saw that unless they did some quick thinking, they were in danger of drying up and blowing away. Accordingly, by common consent, they secreted and surrounded themselves with a jelly-like mass capable of absorbing and holding water. The amphibious Liverworts and the Ricciocarpus Natans do the same thing today.