IV. The Web of Life: Mother Nature at Her Loom
Big boys and girls, when they finish high-school, have to write graduation essays. One of the subjects they often choose to write about is "The Web of Life is Strangely Woven." They like to tell how life is made up of different things, all woven together: Joy and sorrow, health and sickness, work and play are woven in and out into one web. They see the poetry and the prose of living, loving, working, enjoying.
The writer of this had been out of school a long, long time before he learned that his own body was just such a wonderful web. A living body, of a plant or an animal, is a web. It is made up of single cells, multiplied and woven together. Mother Nature uses the same kind of cells, put together in different ways, to make leaf, stem, bark, flower and fruit, in the tree. So she makes skin-tissue, bone-tissue, muscle-tissue, nerve-tissue in the animal.
It took Mother Nature ages and ages, sitting at her loom, experimenting, to learn to make these different tissues out of one material. In the amoeba she had only a very thin skin and a jelly-like muscle. In the sponge she made a horny bone. In the earthworm she made the first ring muscle.
If you get up very close to Mother Nature, as she sits at her loom, you can watch how she works. Her shuttle has a back and forth movement, through the long web of lives. First, she made a plant cell that couldn't move, then an animal that could. Then she made the sponge, an animal that was fastened to a rock, like a deep-sea lichen; then a sea-anemone that could let go of the rock. The amoeba hasn't any bones, the sponge has, the jelly-fish hasn't, the star-fish has. Now bones are very important. Why, when Mother Nature learned to make them for sponges, did she drop the idea, and then come back to it afterwards?
Let us see if we can find out. We will also see Mother Nature weaving lower forms of life into the higher. What looks more different than Johnny with his fishing pole, and the earthworm he uses for bait? Yet there are many things about that earthworm that are just like things in Johnny. The earthworm's body is made up of ring muscles. Those are the very first hints of the ring-joints in Johnny's backbone. Those ring muscles are what makes it possible
