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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
primal slime. Great writers also have been hatched out of similar lumps of protoplasm. Nor does the uniformity stop there. It can be traced up to a much later stage of organic evolution. If you compare myself in embryo, that is when I was less than two months old in the mother's womb, with the greatest human scribe in the same condition, one could not be distinguished from the other. The father's contribution was just the same in either case-one sperm, microscopically small but of albumen formed like a diminutive tadpole. Also in both the cases, the mother supplied the identically constructed egg to be fertilised by the sperm. The body of this poor cat as well as of the great man evolved out of that identically insignificant, and what is more important, accidental, beginning, to the specific morphological state of its birth. In either instance, it thrived as a parasite on the maternal organism. What the mother contributed, she in her turn got from the sun as chlorophyl. Since we entered into the independent existence on earth, we derived our sustenance, composed of identical substances, from solar radiation. Not only the imposing body of the great man, but also his supposedly superior brain, indeed the entire wealth of extraordinary "spiritual" qualities he is credulously credited with, have absolutely no other mysterious foundation than the accidental combination of the fatherly sperm with the motherly egg, and chemical com
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