bacteria

59:4.13The earth was be­ing rapidly over­run by the new or­ders of land veg­e­ta­tion. Here­to­fore few plants grew on land ex­cept about the wa­ter’s edge. Now, and sud­denly, the pro­lific fern fam­ily ap­peared and quickly spread over the face of the rapidly ris­ing land in all parts of the world. Tree types, two feet thick and forty feet high, soon de­vel­oped; later on, leaves evolved, but these early va­ri­eties had only rudi­men­tary fo­liage. There were many smaller plants, but their fos­sils are not found since they were usu­ally de­stroyed by the still ear­lier ap­pear­ing bac­te­ria.

65:5.2But through­out all of this bi­o­logic ad­ven­ture our great­est dis­ap­point­ment grew out of the re­ver­sion of cer­tain prim­i­tive plant life to the prechloro­phyll lev­els of par­a­sitic bac­te­ria on such an ex­ten­sive and un­ex­pected scale. This even­tu­al­ity in plant-life evo­lu­tion caused many dis­tress­ful dis­eases in the higher mam­mals, par­tic­u­larly in the more vul­ner­a­ble hu­man species. When we were con­fronted with this per­plex­ing sit­u­a­tion, we some­what dis­counted the dif­fi­cul­ties in­volved be­cause we knew that the sub­se­quent ad­mix­ture of the Adamic life plasm would so re­in­force the re­sist­ing pow­ers of the re­sult­ing blended race as to make it prac­ti­cally im­mune to all dis­eases pro­duced by the veg­etable type of or­gan­ism. But our hopes were doomed to dis­ap­point­ment ow­ing to the mis­for­tune of the Adamic de­fault.

65:2.3The bac­te­ria, sim­ple veg­etable or­gan­isms of a very prim­i­tive na­ture, are very lit­tle changed from the early dawn of life; they even ex­hibit a de­gree of ret­ro­gres­sion in their par­a­sitic be­hav­ior. Many of the fungi also rep­re­sent a ret­ro­grade move­ment in evo­lu­tion, be­ing plants which have lost their chloro­phyll-mak­ing abil­ity and have be­come more or less par­a­sitic. The ma­jor­ity of dis­ease-caus­ing bac­te­ria and their aux­il­iary virus bod­ies re­ally be­long to this group of rene­gade par­a­sitic fungi. Dur­ing the in­ter­ven­ing ages all of the vast king­dom of plant life has evolved from an­ces­tors from which the bac­te­ria have also de­scended.

49:4.6Mor­tals all have the same gen­eral strug­gles with mi­cro­scopic foes in their early days, such as you now ex­pe­ri­ence on Uran­tia, though per­haps not so ex­ten­sive. The length of life varies on the dif­fer­ent plan­ets from twenty-five years on the prim­i­tive worlds to near five hun­dred on the more ad­vanced and older spheres.