This is the NAVEL. The corrugation is the cicatrice left where once was attached the umbilical cord, and whence its remains, having died, sloughed away. This organ introduces us to the foetal life of Man; for it was the link of connexion between, the unborn infant and the parent; the channel, through whose arteries and veins the oxygenated and the effete blood passed to and from the parental system, when as yet the unused lungs had not received one breath of vital air. And thus the life of the individual Man before us passes, by a necessary retrogression, back to the life of another individual, from whose substance his own substance was formed by gemmation; one of the component cells of whose structure was the primordial cell, from which have been developed successively all the cells which now make up his mature and perfect organism. * * * * * How is it possible to avoid this conclusion? Has not the physiologist irrefragable grounds for it, founded on universal experience? Has not observation abundantly shown, that, wherever the bones, flesh, blood, teeth, nails, hair of man exist, the aggregate body has passed through stages exactly correspondent to those alluded to above, and has originated in the uterus of a mother, its foetal life being, so to speak, a budding out of hers? Has the combined experience of mankind ever seen a solitary exception to this law? How, then, can we refuse the concession that, in the individual before us, in whom we find all the phenomena that we are accustomed to associate with adult Man, repeated in the most exact verisimilitude, without a single flaw--how, I say, can we hesitate to assert that such was his origin too? And yet, in order to assert it, we must be prepared to adopt the old Pagan doctrine of the eternity of matter; _ex nihilo nihil fit_. But those with whom I argue are precluded from this, by my first Postulate. XI. PARALLELS AND PRECEDENTS. (_Germs._) "Every cell, like every individual Plant or Animal, is the product of a previous organism of the same kind."--(DR. CARPENTER, _Comp. Physiol._ Sec. 347.)