66 THE ASCENT OF THE BODY. 



Between the early cell and the infant's formed body, 

 the ordinary observer sees the uneventful passage of 

 a few brief months. But the evolutionist sees con- 

 centrated into these few months the labor and the 

 progress of incalculable ages. Here before him is the 

 whole stretch of time since life first dawned upon the 

 earth ; and as he watches the nascent organism climb- 

 ing to its maturity he witnesses a spectacle which for 

 strangeness and majesty stands alone in the field of 

 biological research. What he sees is not the mere 

 shaping or sculpturing of a Man. The human form 

 does not begin as a human form. It begins as an 

 animal ; and at first, and for a long time to come there 

 is nothing wearing the remotest semblance of human- 

 ity. What meets the eye is a vast procession of lower 

 forms of life, a succession of strange inhuman creat- 

 ures emerging from a crowd of still stranger and still 

 more inhuman creatures; and it is only after a pro- 

 longed and unrecognizable series of metamorphoses 

 that they culminate in some faint likeness to the im- 

 age of him who is one of the newest yet the oldest of 

 created things. Hitherto we have been taught to look 

 among the fossiliferous formations of Geology for the 

 buried lives of the earth's past. But Embryology has 

 startled the world by declaring that the ancient life of 

 the earth is not dead. It is risen. It exists to-day in 

 the embryos of still-living things, and some of the 

 most archaic types find again a resurrection and a life 

 in the frame of man himself. 



It is an amazing and almost incredible story. The 

 proposition is not only that Man begins his earthly 

 existence in the guise of a lower animal-embryo, but 

 that in the successive transformations of the human 



