German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel called this process cell “autogeny” and likened it to the process of inorganic crystallization. An English counterpart of Haeckel’s, T. H. Huxley, proposed a simple two-step method of chemical recombination to explain the origin of the first cell. Just as salt could be produced spontaneously by adding sodium to chloride, so, Haeckel and Huxley thought, could a living cell be produced by combining several chemical constituents and then allowing spontaneous chemical reactions to produce the simple protoplasmic substance they assumed to be the essence
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