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You must look at the rudely outlined heroic human figure in the block of stone, not at the rough unfinished pedestal, if you would know Michel Angelo. So in the hydra and the annelid you must look at the possibilities of the nervous system before you or he think that digestion and muscle are all. Once more the highest powers dawn far down in the animal kingdom.
Some derive the Insects from the Myriapods, some the Myriapods from the Insects, and some think they evolved independently; while the rise of the spiders and scorpions is even more obscure. But how can we see any trace of an Annelid ancestor in the vastly different frames of these animals which are said to descend from it? It is not so difficult as it seems to be at first sight.
Between these two was the perivisceral cavity, filled with nutritive fluid, lymph, and furnishing a safe lodging-place for the more delicate viscera. It represented fairly the trunk of higher animals. The annelid added segmentation, and thus greater freedom of motion by the parapodia. But the segments were still practically alike.
Among the articulates there were annelid worms one and a half meters long, furnished with a pink proboscis, equipped with 1,700 organs of locomotion, snaking through the waters, and as they went, throwing off every gleam in the solar spectrum.
In the annelid especially, and to some extent in the schematic worm, the supra-oesophageal ganglion is relieved in part of the direct control of the muscular fibrils and has become an organ of perception and the seat of government of lower nervous centres. In all higher forms it innervates directly only the principal sense-organs of the head.
The free-swimming embryo of an aquatic annelid, being ovate and not ciliated all over, moves with one end foremost; and its differentiations proceed in conformity with this contrast of circumstances.
At the base of the Cambrian strata in Sweden, which in the neighbourhood of Lake Wener are perfectly horizontal, lie ripple-marked quartzose sandstones with worm-tracks and annelid borings, like some of those found in the Harlech grits of the Longmynd. Among these are some which have been referred doubtfully to plants. These sandstones have been called in Sweden "fucoid sandstones."
In their dark crevices huge crustaceans, aiming their long legs like heavy artillery, watched us with unblinking eyes, while underfoot there crept millipedes, bloodworms, aricia worms, and annelid worms, whose antennas and tubular tentacles were incredibly long.
If we come now to consider the more partial phosphorescence of the sea, we find that it is due to animals belonging to almost every group of marine forms to Echinoderms, or creatures of the sea-urchin and star-fish type, to Annelid worm, to Medusidæ, or jelly-fish, as they are popularly called, including the "great domes" and the "silvery disks" of the passage above quoted from Professor Martin Duncan, to Tunicates, among which is the Pyrosoma, to Mollusks, Crustaceans, and in very many cases to Actinozoa, or forms belonging to the type of the sea anemone and the coral polyp.
Given man and environment as they are, and a belief in God is a necessary result. But you may ask, if we are to worship a personal God, why might not a conscious and religious hydra, with equal right, worship an infinite stomach, and the annelid a god of mere brute force? There stands in Florence a magnificent statue by Michel Angelo. A human figure is only partially hewn out of the stone.
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