"THE COMING OF LIFE 13 



or exploring the attic of an old house. We see only samples 

 or fragments of departed greatness, of which most has long 

 since been destroyed. Our systematic zoologists left among 

 worms all forms for which they could find no place elsewhere. 

 These relics and nondescripts became isolated through the 

 extinction of long series of connecting links. Many have 

 strayed far and show few traces of their original home and 

 ancestry. Others have been deformed by parasitism, the last 

 refuge of weak and defeated animals. 



But there is a deeper reason for their vast range of varia- 

 tion and adaptation. Give to a number of isolated savages 

 who have never seen a hut all the materials for a house; and 

 let every man build uncontrolled, as he will. Every one builds 

 busily. The results are marvellous in their variety and ec- 

 centricity. Most of the buildings fall almost immediately in 

 hopeless ruin. A few erect rudiments of a decent shelter. 

 Or you may compare the period when the worms formed the 

 vanguard and pioneers of animal development to the period 

 of the Judges in Hebrew history: when " there was no king 

 in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own 

 eyes." 



The worms had inherited two layers of cells and two organs 

 and a sacklike body. The wall of this body corresponded 

 practically to a bit of skin covering a piece of the lining of 

 the intestine. All structures between these two layers of our 

 body were yet to come. They had the tissues out of which 

 the other organs were to be builded. Their problem and task 

 was to frame the other organs, and then combine them in one 

 tough, strong mobile body adapted to all the conditions of 

 life. In this experiment there were no hereditary achieve- 

 ments to guide them. The world of life must have been a 

 marvellous sight during the era of the earliest worms. Most 

 of the earliest experiments must have failed and disappeared 

 quickly. 



Traces of an early stage of vermian development have 

 persisted in the flat worms or platyhelminthes, especially in 

 the turbellaria, small worms oval or elliptical in outline; 



