In the worm forms, which evolve from the Gastrœada, we come across
the first attempt at special sense-organ formation, in the shape of
depressions on the integument of the body. The Himatega, or sack-worms,
possess a rudimentary spinal cord, and were the parents of the first
true vertebrates, organisms without skulls or brains, but with a true
vertebral cord. These little vermiform animals, in addition to their
rudimentary spinal cords, exhibited upon the surface of the body
several small depressions, which answered the purpose of a set of
special sense-organs, one tiny depression being set apart especially
for the perception of light waves, another for the perception of sound
waves, another for the perception of odours, etc.; and thus gradually
came about that wonderful evolutionary process by which bodies became
endowed with more or less perfect special sense-organs.
As the animal kingdom developed into higher and higher forms of
life, and skulls and brains became the order of the day, the special
sense-organs became possessed of larger powers, at the same time
that the whole nervous organisation assumed higher and more complex
functions, resulting eventually in a very gradual unfolding of the most
wonderful of all the latent potentialities of universal life—the marvel
of consciousness. This is the present climax of Nature’s evolution, the
grandest and most awful achievement of that hidden and mysterious force
which baffles comprehension, and beside which all things seen, heard,
or felt pale into insignificance.
To point out the precise method of the evolution of mind, step by step,
until the final climax of consciousness was reached, would require an
abler pen than mine; therefore I shall be content to briefly notice
the different products of intellectual development in the order in
which they are unfolded, showing the analogy between ontogenesis, or
the life-history of the individual, and phylogenesis, or that of the
whole race, not now as regards bodily, but only mental, evolution. We
must ever remember that the biogenetic law insists that the process
of development in the race is reflected in miniature in the embryonic
history of every individual. In other words, it is, beyond doubt, an
accepted article of faith with biologists that the development of the
individual from the embryo _in utero_ to the full-grown man is an exact
counterpart of the development of the whole race from the primitive
protoplasmic atom, the lowly Moneron, to _homo sapiens_, equally in
regard to mental as to bodily evolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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