gaze on the uncouth forms that enter into, or illustrate, the line of
our ancestry. And if the imagination recoils from the strange and
remote figures that are lit up by our search-light, and hesitates to
accept them as ancestral forms, science draws aside another veil and
reveals another picture to us. It shows us that each of us passes, in
our embryonic development, through a series of forms hardly less
uncouth and unfamiliar. Nay, it traces a parallel between the two
series of forms. It shows us man beginning his existence, in the ovary
of the female infant, as a minute and simple speck of jelly-like
plasm. It shows us (from analogy) the fertilised ovum breaking into a
cluster of cohering cells, and folding and curving, until the
limb-less, head-less, long-tailed foetus looks like a worm-shaped
body. It then points out how gill-slits and corresponding
blood-vessels appear, as in a lowly fish, and the fin-like extremities
bud out and grow into limbs, and so on; until, after a very clear
ape-stage, the definite human form emerges from the series of
transformations.

It is with this embryological evidence for our evolution that the
present volume is concerned. There are illustrations in the work that
will make the point clear at a glance. Possibly TOO clear; for the
simplicity of the idea and the eagerness to apply it at every point
have carried many, who borrow hastily from Haeckel, out of their
scientific depth. Haeckel has never shared their errors, nor
encouraged their superficiality. He insists from the outset that a
complete parallel could not possibly be expected. Embryonic life
itself is subject to evolution. Though there is a general and
substantial law--as most of our English and American authorities
admit--that the embryonic series of forms recalls the ancestral series
of forms, the parallel is blurred throughout and often distorted. It