The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by Professor E. Ray Lankester.

  • Ernst Haeckel
Date:
1883
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by Professor E. Ray Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by one vertebra ]onger than in man. There still exist rudimentary muscles in the human tail which formerly moved it. Another case of human rudimentary organs, only belong- ing to the male, and which obtains in like manner in all male mammals, is furnished by the mammary glands on the breast, which, as a rule, are active only in the female sex. However, cases of different mammals are known, especially of men, sheep, and goats, in which the mammary glands were fully developed in the male sex, and yielded milk as food for their offspring. I have already mentioned before (p. 12) that the rudimentary auricular muscles in man can still be employed to move their ears, by some persons who have persevering] y practised them. In fact, rudimentary organs are frequently very differently developed in different individuals of the same species; in some they are tolerably large, in others very small. This circumstance is very im- portant for their explanation, as is also the other circum- stance that generally in embryos, or in a very early period of life, they are much larger and stronger in proportion to the rest of the body than they are in fully developed and fully grown organisms. This can, in particular, be easily pointed out in the rudimentary sexual organs of plants (stamens and pistil), which I have already mentioned. They are proportionately much larger in the young flower-bud than in the mature flower. I have remarked (p. 15) that rudimentary or suppressed organs were the strongest supports of the monistic or mechanical conception of the universe. If its opponents, the dualists and teleologists, understood the immense signifi- cance of rudimentary organs, it would put them into a state