The main objection which can be raised against Lankester's view is that it presupposes a type of delamination which does not occur in nature except in Geryonia. Metschnikoff has propounded a third view with reference to delamination. He starts as before with a ciliated blastosphere. He next supposes the cells from the walls of this to become budded off into the central cavity, as in Eucope (fig. 202), and to lose their cilia. These cells give rise to an internal parenchyma, which carries on an intracellular digestion. At a later stage a central digestive cavity is supposed to be formed. This view of the passage from the protozoon to the metazoon state, though to my mind improbable in itself, fits in very well with the ontogeny of the lower Hydrozoa. Another view has been put forward by myself in the chapter on the Porifera[123], to the effect that the amphiblastula larva of Calcispongiæ may be a transitional form between the Protozoa and the Metazoa, composed of a hemisphere of nutritive amoeboid cells, and a hemisphere of ciliated cells. The absence of such a larval form in the Coelenterata and higher Metazoa is opposed, however, to this larva being regarded as a transitional form, except for the Porifera. [123] Vol. II. p. 149. It is obvious that so long as there is complete uncertainty as to the value to be attached to the early developmental processes, it is not possible to decide from these processes whether there is only a single metazoon phylum or whether there may not be two or more such phyla. At the same time there appear to be strong arguments for regarding the Porifera as a phylum of the Metazoa derived independently from the Protozoa. This seems to me to be shewn (1) by the striking larval peculiarities of the Porifera; (2) by the early development of the mesoblast in the Porifera, which stands in strong contrast to the absence of this layer in the embryos of most Coelenterata; and above all, (3) by the remarkable characters of the system of digestive channels. A further argument in the same direction is supplied by the fact that the germinal layers of the Sponges very probably do not correspond physiologically to the germinal layers of other types. The embryological evidence is insufficient to decide whether the amphiblastula larva is, as suggested above, to be regarded as the larval ancestor of the Porifera. Homologies of the germinal layers. The question as to how far there is a complete homology between the two primary germinal layers throughout the Metazoa was the third of the questions proposed to be discussed here. Since there are some Metazoa with only two germinal layers, and other Metazoa with three, and since, as is shewn in the following section, the third layer or mesoblast can only be regarded as a derivative of one or both the primary layers, it is clear that a complete homology between the two primary germinal layers does not exist.