296 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
_ As the object of these pages is solely to further the 
general knowledge of natural truths, and to spread, in wider 
circles, a natural conception of the relations of man to the 
rest of nature, I shall be justified if I do not pay any 
regard to the widely-spread prejudice in favour of an ex- 
ceptional and privileged position for man in creation, and 
simply give here the embryological facts from which the 
reader will be able to draw conclusions affirming the 
groundlessness of those prejudices. I wish all the more 
to entreat him to refleet carefully upon these facts of on- 
togeny, as it is my firm conviction that a general knowledge 
of them can only promote the intellectual advance, and 
thereby the mental perfecting, of the human race. 
Amidst all the infinitely rich and interesting material 
which lies before us in the ontogeny of vertebrate animals, 
that is, in the history of their individual development, I shall 
here confine myself to showing some of those facts which 
are of the greatest importance to the Theory of Descent in 
general, as well as in its special application to man. Man 
is at the beginning of his individual existence a simple egg, 
a single little cell, just the same as every animal organism 
which originates by sexual generation. The human egg is 
essentially the same as that of all other mammals, and can- 
not be distinguished from the egg of the higher mammals. 
The egg represented in Fig. 5 might be that of a man or an 
ape as well as of a dog,a horse, or any other mammal. Not 
only the form and structure, but even the size of the egg in 
most mammals is the same as in man, namely, about the 
120th part of an inch in diameter, so that the egg under 
favorable circumstances, with the naked eye, can just be 
perceived as a small speck. The differences which really 
