The flounder was noted as a variant of the fish theme which seemed to be a descendant of a symmetrical ancestor because its structural plan was like that of other bony fishes. If this be true, and if in its development a flounder must review its mode of evolution as a species, the young fish ought to be symmetrical; and it actually is. The grotesque skate and hammerhead shark were demonstrated to be derivatives of a simpler type of shark; their embryos are practically indistinguishable from those of ordinary dogfish and sharks.
Among the jointed animals a wealth of interesting material is found by the embryologist. All crabs seemed to be modified lobsterlike creatures; to confirm this interpretation, based solely upon details of adult structure, young crabs pass through a stage when to all intents and purposes they are counterparts of lobsters. Even the twisted hermit crab, which has a soft-skinned hinder part coiled to fit the curve of the snail shell used as a protection, is symmetrical and lobster-like when it is a larva.
Among the insects many examples occur that are already familiar to every one. The egg of a common house-fly hatches into a larva called a maggot; in this condition the body destined to become the vastly different fly is composed of soft-skinned segments very much alike and also similar to the joints of a worm. Comparative anatomy demonstrates that the fly and all other insects have arisen from wormlike ancestors, whose originally similar segments later differentiated in various ways to become the diverse segments of adult insects; the embryonic history of flies of to-day corroborates these assertions, in so far as every individual fly actually does become a wormlike larva before it changes into the final and complete adult insect. The other kinds of insects are equally striking in their life-histories. All beetles, such as the potato bug and June bug, develop from grubs which, like the maggots of flies, are similar to worms in numerous respects.
Butterflies and moths pass through a caterpillar stage having even more striking resemblances to worms. All the larvæ of insects are therefore like one another, and like worms also, in certain fundamental characters of internal and external structure; so the conclusion that the whole group of insects has arisen by evolution from more primitive ancestors resembling the worms of to-day is based upon mutually explanatory details of comparative anatomy and embryology.
Let us now turn back to some of the earlier pages of the embryological record which we passed over in order that we might translate the later portions dealing with more familiar and intelligible structures like gills. Before the egg of the frog becomes an elliptical mass of cells, it is at one time a double-walled sac enclosing a central cavity; in this stage it is called a _gastrula_. Tracing back the mode of its formation, we find that it is produced from a hollow sphere of fewer cells that are essentially alike; this stage also is so important that the special term _blastula_ is applied to it. Still earlier, there are fewer cells--128 or thereabouts, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1.
In other words, the starting point in the development of the frog is a _single biological unit_; this divides and its products redivide to constitute the many-celled blastula and the double-walled gastrula. All the other animals we have mentioned begin like the frog, as eggs which are single cells and nothing more; they too pass on to become blastulæ and gastrulæ, similar to those of the frog in all essential respects, particularly as regards the nature of the organs produced by each of the two primary layers, and the mode of their formation. Does the occurrence of blastulæ and gastrulæ and one-celled beginnings mean that the higher animals composed of numerous and much differentiated cells have evolved in company from two-layered saccular ancestors which were themselves the descendants of spherical colonies of like cells, and ultimately of one-celled animals?
Comparative anatomy has asserted that this is so, as we have already learned, for it finds that adult animals array themselves at different levels of a scale beginning at the bottom with the protozoa, continuing on to the two-layered animals like _Hydra_ and jellyfish and sea-anemones, and then extending upwards to the region of the more complicated invertebrates and vertebrates. It was difficult perhaps to believe that these successive grades of organic structure indicated an order of evolution, because it seemed impossible that an animal so simple as a protozoan could produce offspring with the complex organization of a frog or a cat, even in long ages. But development delivers its evidence relating to this matter with telling and impressive force. How can we doubt the possibility of an evolution of higher animals from ancestors as simple as _Hydra_ and _Amoeba_ when a frog and a cat, like all other complicated organisms, begin individual existence as single cells, and pass through gastrula stages? If we deny it, we contradict the evidence of our senses, for the development is actually accomplished by the transformation of a single cell into a double-walled sac, and of this into different and more intricate organic mechanisms.
The process _can_ take place, for it _does_ take place. Not until the investigator becomes familiar with a wide range of diverse animals and the peculiar qualities of their similar early stages, can he estimate the tremendous weight of the facts of comparative embryology. Were the statement iterated and reiterated on every page and in every paragraph, there would be no undue emphasis put upon the astounding fact that the apparently impassable gap between a one-celled animal like _Amoeba_ and a mammal like a cat is actually compassed during the development of the last-named organisms from single cells. The occurrence of gill-slits in the embryos of lizards, birds, and mammals now seems a small thing when compared with the correspondences disclosed by the earliest stages of development. But in spite of their complexity, all the changes of "growing up" are explained and understood by the simple formula that the mode of individual development owes its nature primarily to the hereditary influence of earlier ancestors back to the original animals which were protozoa.
Embryology as a distinct division of zoölogy has grown out of studies of classification and comparative anatomy. Its beginnings may be found in medieval natural history, for as far back as 1651 Harvey had pointed out that all living things originate from somewhat similar germs, the terse dictum being "Ex ovo omnia." By the end of the eighteenth century many had turned to the study of developing organisms, though their views by no means agreed as to the way an adult was related to the egg. Some, like Bonnet, held that the germ was a minute and complete replica of its parent, which simply unfolded and enlarged like a bud to produce a similar organism. Even if this were true, little would be gained, for it would still remain unknown how the germinal miniature originated to be just what it was conceived and assumed to be. Wolff was the originator of the view that is now practically universal among naturalists, namely, that development is a real process of transformation from simpler to more complex conditions.
The subject of comparative embryology grew rapidly during the nineteenth century as the field of comparative anatomy became better known, and when naturalists became interested in animals, not only as specific types, but also as the finished products of an intricate series of transformations. When life-histories were more closely compared, the meaning of the resemblances between early stages of diverse adult organisms was read by the same method which in comparative anatomy finds that consanguinity is expressed by resemblance.
The great law of recapitulation, stated in one form by Von Baer and more definitely by Haeckel in the terms employed in the foregoing sections, was for a time too freely used and too rigidly applied by naturalists whose enthusiasm clouded their judgment. A strong reaction set in during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when attention was directed to the anachronisms of the embryonic record and to the alterations that are the results of larval or embryonic adaptation as short cuts in development. Nevertheless, it is not seriously questioned, I believe, that the main facts of a single life-history owe their nature to the past evolution of the species to which a given animal belongs.
Nowadays the problems in this well-organized department are concerned not only with more accurate accounts of the development of animals, but also with the mechanics of development, with the relative value of external and internal influences, and above all with the physical basis of inheritance. It is clear that the factors that direct the development of a wood frog's egg so that it becomes a wood-frog and not a tree-toad must lie in the egg itself, as derivatives from the two parent organisms. Weismann and his followers have proved that a peculiar substance in the nuclei of the egg and its daughter-products contains the essential factors of development, whatever these may be. Experiments dealing with the phenomena of heredity in pure and mixed breeds have largely confirmed Weismann's doctrine, and they have prepared the way for a deeper investigation of the marvelous process of biological inheritance.
However much he may be interested in the details of embryological science, the general student of natural history is more concerned with the bearing of its primary laws upon the great problem of evolution. In the foregoing brief review of the fundamental facts and principles of this subject, the purpose has been to show how the phenomena of development are viewed by men of science, and how they take their place in the doctrine of organic evolution. And it has also been made plain that comparative anatomy and comparative embryology support and supplement one another in countless ways and places, although each in itself is a complete demonstration that evolution is a real and a natural process.