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It is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert. Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from tidal ascidian.
"The beginning of man an ascidian his ultimate development as an angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag." Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old friend, and even now if any one began a conversation on the theory of development and evolution she invariably lost her temper and permitted herself to say rude things.
Nay thunders Science put away such childish superstition, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole in primeval seas. In all the wide universe of modern speculation there remains no unexplored nook or cranny, where an immortal human soul can find refuge or haven.
Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to be rectified in a single generation.
I must confess, however, that the more I have pondered over it, the more grounds appear in its favour, though I am not convinced that there is any real parallelism between the mode of development of the ganglion of the Ascidian and that of the Vertebrate cerebro-spinal axis.
At the Falkland Islands I had the satisfaction of seeing, in April, 1833, and therefore some years before any other naturalist, the locomotive larvae of a compound Ascidian, closely allied to Synoicum, but apparently generically distinct from it. The tail was about five times as long as the oblong head, and terminated in a very fine filament.
In the transition that once took place from one species of ascidian larva to a form similar to the lancelet fish, he sees the new branch diverging in the series of vertebrates.
Judge for yourself; the latter derives the genesis of man from a group of plastides, from the jelly-like moneron; this moneron, through the ameoba, the ascidian, the brainless and heartless amphioxus, and so on, transmigrates in the eighth remove into the lamprey, is transformed, at last, into a vertebrate amniote, into a premammalian, into a marsupial animal.... The vampire, in its turn, belongs to the species of vertebrates.
Goodsir long ago insisted upon the resemblance between Amphioxus and the Ascidians; but the notion of a genetic connection between the two, and especially the identification of the notochord of the Vertebrate with the axis of the caudal appendage of the larva of the Ascidian, is a novelty which, at first, takes one's breath away.
We're too much inclined to forget we've developed soul quite comparatively recently, and, therefore, that there is probably just as long a journey ahead of us before we reach the ultimate of intellectual and spiritual development as there is behind us physically from, say the parent ascidian, to you and me.
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