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It will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform certain acquired actions, throws any light upon Embryology and inherited instincts, and otherwise to follow the train of thought which the class of actions above mentioned may suggest.
From embryology in particular, as elsewhere in general, we read the “fundamental biogenetic law,” that evolution is from the general to the special, from the imperfect to the more perfect, from what is still indefinite and exuberant to the well-defined and precise, but never from the special to the special.
Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn'd my Philosophy into Divinity. To affirm that Sir Thomas Browne was the founder of chemical embryology or, indeed, to contend that he made a great impress upon the progress of embryology is to humour our fancy. As Browne himself reminds us, "a good cause needs not to be patron'd by a passion."
A whole science devoted to the embryology of human institutions has thus developed in the hands of Bachofen, MacLennan, Morgan, Edwin Tylor, Maine, Post, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, and many others. And that science has established beyond any doubt that mankind did not begin its life in the shape of small isolated families.
Within the vertebrate stem there is, as we have already seen, so complete an agreement in structure and embryology that it is impossible to doubt their phylogenetic unity. In this case the evidence is much clearer and more abundant. The first three features are shared by the Vertebrates with the ascidia-larvae and the Prochordonia; the fourth is peculiar to them.
However, I cannot but regret that I am unable at this time to trace more extensively subjects for which I should have ample opportunities here, as for instance the anatomy of the echinoderms, and also the embryology of the lower animals in general. . . This winter, notwithstanding the limitations imposed upon his work by the state of his health, was a very happy one to Agassiz.
At this time there were only two men who habitually dined with him: a young zoologist called Von Koren, who had come for the summer to the Black Sea to study the embryology of the medusa, and a deacon called Pobyedov, who had only just left the seminary and been sent to the town to take the duty of the old deacon who had gone away for a cure.
The most complex and differentiated tracts of even the highest animals have evolved from a simple sac like that of a polyp or jellyfish, as we know from the independent testimony of comparative anatomy and embryology; in this case also the evolution of alimentary functions is no less inseparable from the transformations in structural respects.
Therefore natural theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle's great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is so Dante discerned that she was made." There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words. I mean questions of Embryology and questions of Race.
Far more intricate are the processes of human embryology; in these are condensed and comprised thousands of the phylogenetic processes.
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