I believe that we can extend this same interpretation to all other cases
of embryonic resemblance. It will explain the occurrence of gill-slits
in the embryo of the bird, and the presence of a notochord in the higher
forms in exactly the same way as the cleavage stages are explained. But
how, it may be asked, can we explain the apparent resemblance between
the embryo of the higher form and the adult of lower groups. The answer
is that this resemblance is deceptive, and in so far as there is a
resemblance it depends on the resemblance of the adult of the lower form
to its own embryonic stages with which we can really make a comparison.
The gill-slits of the embryo of the chick are to be compared, not with
those of the adult fish, but with those of the embryo of the fish. It is
a significant fact, in this connection, that the gill-slits appear as
early in the embryo of the fish as they do in the bird! The notochord of
the embryo bird is comparable with that of the embryo of amphioxus, and
not with the persistent notochord in the adult amphioxus. Here also it
is of the first importance to find that the notochord appears both in
the embryo bird and in amphioxus at the very beginning of the
development. The embryo bird is not fishlike except in so far as there
are certain organs in the embryo fish that are retained in the adult
form. The embryo bird bears the same relation to the embryo fish that
the early segmentation stages of the mollusk bear to the early
segmentation stages of the annelid. There are certain obvious
resemblances between this view and that of Von Baer, but there are also
some fundamental differences between the two conceptions.
Von Baer thought that within each group the embryonic development is the
same up to a certain point. He supposed that the characters of the group
are the first to appear, then those of the order, class, family, genus,
and, finally, of the species. He supposed that two similar species would
follow the same method of development until the very last stage was
reached, when each would then add the final touches that give the
individual its specific character. We may call this the theory of
embryonic parallelism. Here there is an important difference between my
view and that of Von Baer, for I should not expect to find the two
embryos of any two species identical at any stage of their development,
but at most there might exist a close resemblance between them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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