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Hence in our phylogenetic inquiry and in the comparative study of the living, divergent descendants, there can only be a question of determining the greater or less remoteness of the latter from the ancestral form. Not a single one of the older stem-forms has continued unchanged down to our time.
But, for the present, in view of this patent incompleteness of our chief sources of evidence, we must naturally be careful not to lay too much stress in human phylogeny on the particular animals we have studied, or regard all the various stages of development with equal confidence as stem-forms.
In the unarticulated stem-forms of the Chordonia, which we have called the Prochordonia, the two coelom-pouches, and therefore also the muscle-plates of their walls, were not yet segmented. This segmentation of the muscles was the momentous historical process with which vertebration, and the development of the vertebrate stem, began.
The Aryo-Romanic and the Slavo-Germanic tongues have completely disappeared; so also the Aryan, the Greco-Roman, the Slavo-Lettic, and the ancient Germanic. Even their daughters and grand-daughters have been lost; all the living Indo-Germanic languages are only related in the sense that they are divergent descendants of common stem-forms.
It is a universal and natural procedure in phylogenetic development that the stem-forms themselves, with their specific peculiarities, have been extinct for some time. The forms that approach nearest to them among the living species are more or less perhaps very substantially different from them.
The statement can only rationally mean that the living forms I have referred to are COLLATERAL LINES that are much more closely related to the extinct stem-forms, and have retained the resemblance much better, than any other animals we know.
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