THE SUDDEN ORIGIN OF NEW TYPES 



By FELIX OSWALD, D.Sc, B.A., F.G.S. 

 Probate Registrar, Nottingham 



Formerly the opinion was generally held by comparative 

 anatomists that simplicity of structure necessarily implies a 

 persistence of the primitive organisation of the race ; this view 

 is still not without some supporters at the present day. The 

 theory, however, has not only proved unfruitful but has acted 

 as a positive bar to the correct estimation of affinities and 

 pedigrees in the organic world. It is by no means the least of 

 the late Anton Dohrn's services to biology that he was among 

 the first to make a stand against the view prevalent at the time, 

 to the effect that organisms of relatively simple construction, 

 such as Amphioxus or Ascidians, are necessarily archaic sur- 

 vivals or in any way represent the actual links in the ancestral 

 chain of the higher or more complicated forms of the same 

 group. This older view was all the more alluring to the laity 

 because it was so easy to comprehend, but every new discovery 

 in the field of palaeontology tends only to discredit it still 

 further and to render the position of its supporters more and 

 more untenable. 



The comparative study of languages, which has furnished so 

 many interesting parallels to the processes of organic evolution, 

 can also supply us with a close analogy to the case under 

 consideration. The English language which has spread so 

 successfully all over the world is far simpler and less inflected 

 than its ancestral Saxon of King Alfred's day ; whilst Sanskrit, 

 the oldest known type of the Indo-European group of languages, 

 possesses the greatest number of inflections. In Chinese, no 

 less than in English, inflections have fallen extensively into 

 disuse owing to the gradual adoption of a fixed word-order and 

 a multiplicity of particles, but it is obvious that the resulting 

 simplicity by no means implies that these modern languages are 

 archaic survivals. 



The main distinction between primitiveness and simplicity of 



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