THE ASCENT OF THE BODY. 73 



closely, in more or less modified manner, the suc- 

 cessive ancestral stages through which the present 

 condition has been acquired." * Almost foreseen by 

 Agassiz, suggested by Von Baer, and finally applied 

 by Fritz Muller, this singular law is the key-note of 

 modern Embryology. In no case, it is true, is the 

 recapitulation of the past complete. Ancestral stages 

 are constantly omitted, others are over-accentuated, 

 condensed, distorted, or confused ; while new and un- 

 decipherable characters occasionally appear. But it is 

 a general scientific fact, that over the graves of a 

 myriad aspirants the bodies of Man and of all higher 

 Animals have risen. No one knows why this should 

 be so. Science, at present, has no rationale of the 

 process adequate to explain it. It was formerly held 

 that the entire animal creation had contributed some- 

 thing to the anatomy of Man ; or that as Serres ex- 

 pressed it, " Human Organogenesis is a transitory 

 Comparative Anatomy." But though Man has not 

 such a monopoly of the past as is here inferred — 

 other types having here and there diverged and devel- 

 oped along lines of their own — it is certain that the 

 materials for his body have been brought together 

 from an unknown multitude of lowlier forms of life. 



Those who know the Cathedral of St. Mark's will re- 

 member how this noblest of the Stones of Venice owes 

 its greatness to the patient hands of centuries and 

 centuries of workers, how every quarter of the globe 

 has been spoiled of its treasures to dignify this single 

 shrine. But he who ponders over the more ancient 

 temple of the Human Body will find imagination fail 



1 Marshall, Vertebrate Embryology, p. 26. 



