78 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



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 hypo- 

 theses. The fact that now arrests our wonder is 

 that when the earliest trace of an infant's organiza- 

 tion meets the eye of science it is nothing but a 

 one-celled animal. And so closely does its de- 

 velopment 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 pro- 

 cess 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 segmen- 

 tation ; the employments carried on in the various 

 rooms will become the functions discharged by the 

 organs of the human frame, and line for line the 

 history of the evolution will be found to be the 

 same. 



The embryo of the future man begins life, like 



