CHAPTER 4 



THE NEW CLASSIFICATION 



OF THE ANIMAL WORLD AND 



THE NEW GENEALOGICAL TREE 



The General Premises 



The "Limit Between the Plant and the Animal Worlds 



A general revision of a system, which is akeady more than one 

 hundred years old and which has therefore become very 

 stabiHzed, has now become necessary above all in connection 

 with the earliest Metazoa, because of the discovery that the 

 Cnidaria do not represent the most primitive Metazoa, that 

 their simple structures are a consequence of their transition 

 to the sessile way of life, and that they had evolved from the 

 Turbellaria (the turbellarian theory of the Cnidaria). To these 

 discoveries we must add here also the interpretation which 

 sees in Spongiae a type of Metazoa that had evolved completely 

 separately, and which tries to explain the possible origin of 

 the Ctenophora by way of neoteny from the planktonic larvae 

 of the Turbellarian Polycladida. The notion and the taxon 

 of Coelenterata have now become superfluous because they 

 have lost their meaning. There can no longer be any Coelen- 

 terata, rather, they have really never existed. This group was 

 built on erroneous interpretations. We see that the notion 

 opposite to that of the Coelenterata, that of the Coelomata, 

 also loses its justification as a consequence of the abolition 

 of the Coelenterata. What can be done now in this situation ? 



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