The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy — John Shaqi
The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological PhilosophyHaeckel, Ernst
Philosophy
The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy
Haeckel, Ernst
Biology; Evolution (Biology); Life -- Origin
Comparative psychology comes next in importance to embryology as a
means of studying the ancestral history of the soul. Within the ranks
of the vertebrates we find to-day a long series of evolutionary stages
which reach up from the lowest acrania and cyclostoma to the fishes
and dipneusta, from these to the amphibia, and from these again to the
amniota. Among the latter, moreover, the various orders of reptiles and
birds on the one hand, and of mammals on the other, show us how the
higher psychic powers have been developed step by step from the lower.
To this physiological scale corresponds exactly the morphological
gradation revealed by the comparative anatomy of the brain. The most
interesting and important part of this is that which relates to the
highest developed class--the mammals; within this class we find the
same ever-advancing gradation. At its summit are the primates (man, the
apes, and the half-apes), then the carnivora, a part of the ungulates,
and the other placentals. A wide interval seems to separate these
intelligent mammals from the lower placentals, the marsupials and
monotremes. We do not find in the latter the high quantitative and
qualitative development of the phronema which we have in the former;
yet we find every intermediate stage between the two. The gradual
development of the cerebrum and its chief part--the phronema--took
place during the Tertiary period, the duration of which is estimated by
many recent geologists at from twelve to fifteen (at the least three to
five) million years.
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