Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1910 — When Man Was a Marine Animal. [ARTICLE]

When Man Was a Marine Animal.

It was M. Quintan, a French physiologist, who several years ago wrote a paper to show that the colorless fluid in which the red corpuscles of our blood float and which is called the “blood serum” is the Bame fluid as that which constituted the primeval sea. The earliest forms of life which floated in the primeval sea were such that the cells and tissues of which they were constituted were always bathed by this primeval fluid. When silica became a constituent of the sea these animals jnay have coated themselves with sllieious coverings, but many of their cells were still bathed by the fluid, and some of them as they passed from the sea to the land may have closed up their alimentary canals, so that a distinction arose between their internal organs and their outer superficies, hut stllL for the good of their cellß, they still bathed them In the shllne fluid. To do bo more effectively they took the saline fluid ashore with them in the form of a bloqd serum, and It Is this blood serum which we carry about with us to-day, the most evident relic of the age when we were marine animals.