I first advanced this fundamental principle in my essay On the Gastrulation of Mammals (1877), and sought to show in this way that I assumed a gradual degeneration of the food-yelk and the yelk-sac on the way from the proreptiles to the mammals. "The cenogenetic process of adaptation," I said, "which has occasioned the atrophy of the rudimentary yelk-sac of the mammal, is perfectly clear. It is due to the fact that the young of the mammal, whose ancestors were certainly oviparous, now remain a long time in the womb. As the great store of food-yelk, which the oviparous ancestors gave to the egg, became superfluous in their descendants owing to the long carrying in the womb, and the maternal blood in the wall of the uterus made itself the chief source of nourishment, the now useless yelk-sac was bound to atrophy by embryonic adaptation." My opinion met with little approval at the time; it was vehemently attacked by Kolliker, Hensen, and His in particular. However, it has been gradually accepted, and has recently been firmly established by a large number of excellent studies of mammal gastrulation, especially by Edward Van Beneden's studies of the rabbit and bat, Selenka's on the marsupials and rodents, Heape's and Lieberkuhn's on the mole, Kupffer and Keibel's on the rodents, Bonnet's on the ruminants, etc. From the general comparative point of view, Carl Rabl in his theory of the mesoderm, Oscar Hertwig in the latest edition of his Manual (1902), and Hubrecht in his Studies in Mammalian Embryology (1891), have supported the opinion, and sought to derive the peculiarly modified gastrulation of the mammal from that of the reptile. (FIGURE 1.63. Ovum of the opossum (Didelphys) divided into four. (From Selenka.) b the four segmentation-cells, r directive body, c unnucleated coagulated matter, p, albumin-membrane.)