THE ASCENT OF THE BODY. 61 



of life, it is certain that when he first began to be he 

 was the simple tenant of a single cell. Observe, it is 

 not some animal-ancestor or some human progenitor 

 of Man that lived in this single cell — that may or may 

 not have been — but the individual Man, the present 

 occupant himself. We are dealing now not with phy- 

 logeny — the history of the race — but with ontogeny — 

 the problem of Man's Ascent from his own earlier self. 

 And the point at the moment is not that the race as- 

 cends ; it is that each individual man has once, in his 

 own life-time, occupied a single cell, and starting from 

 that humble cradle, has passed through stage after 

 stage of differentiation, increase, and development, 

 until the myriad-roomed adult-form was attained. 

 Whence that first cradle came is at present no matter. 

 Whether its remote progenitor rocked among the 

 waves of primeval seas or swung from the boughs of 

 forests long since metamorphosed into coal does not 

 affect the question of the individual ascent of Man. 

 The answers to these questions are hypotheses. The 

 fact that now arrests our wonder is that when the ear- 

 liest trace of an infant's organization meets the eye 

 of science it is nothing but a one-celled animal. And 

 so closely does its development from that distant 

 point follow the lines of the evolution just described 

 in the case of the primitive savage hut, that we have 

 but to make a few changes in phraseology to make the 

 one process describe the other. Instead of rooms and 

 chambers we shall now read cells and tissues ; instead 

 of the builder's device of adding room to room, we 

 shall use the physiologist's term segmentation; the 

 employments carried on in the various rooms will be- 

 come the functions discharged by the organs of the 



