68 THE ASCENT OF THE BODY, 



artificer does not begin by building again the press ol 

 Gutenberg, nor in constrncting the locomotive does 

 the engineer first make a Watt's machine and then 

 incorporate the Hedley, and then the Stephenson, and 

 so on through all the improving types of engines that 

 have led up to this. But the astonishing thing is that, 

 in making a Man, Nature does introduce the frame- 

 work of these earlier types, displaying each crude 

 pattern by itself before incorporating it in the finished 

 work. The human embryo, to change the figure, is a 

 subtle phantasmagoria, a living theatre in which a 

 weird transformation scene is being enacted, and in 

 which countless strange and uncouth characters take 

 part. Some of these characters are well-known to 

 science, some are strangers. As the embryo unfolds, 

 one by one these animal actors come upon the stage, 

 file past in phantom-like procession, throw off their 

 drapery, and dissolve away into something else. Yet, 

 as they vanish, each leaves behind a vital portion of 

 itself, some original and characteristic memorial, some- 

 thing itself has made or won, that perhaps it alone 

 could make or win — a bone, a muscle, a ganglion, or a 

 tooth— to be the inheritance of the race. And it is 

 only after nearly all have played their part and dedi- 

 cated their gift, that a human form, mysteriously 

 compounded of all that has gone before, begins to be 

 discerned in their midst. 



The duration of this process, the profound antiquity 

 of the last survivor, the tremendous height he has 

 scaled, are inconceivable by the faculties of Man. But 

 measure the very lowest of the successive platforms 

 passed in the ascent, and see how very great a thing 

 it is even to rise at all. The single cell, the first 



