CREATION BY EVOLUTION
emerge not tadpoles but little frogs, which resemble their parents. If, however, we dissect off the membranes of developing eggs we find within them tadpoles, complete, with their characteristic tails.
The earliest stages in development are the most delicate and vulnerable, and it is these which first become embryonic; the latest stages in development, which represent comparatively recent ancestral history, are always larval. In human development, as we all know, the baby is an embryo for nine months before birth, and after it is born the child may be justly termed a larva until the beginning of puberty. The mental powers are not fully developed until the child reaches the age of about fifteen years.
During the period of its life within the womb the human embryo develops a large organ like a sucker, which is closely pressed against the wall of the womb and which enables the tiny baby to suck nourishment from its mother’s blood. This sucker, which is called the placenta, is developed from the belly of the embryo, which is thereby distorted out of shape. Now no one imagines that some ancestor of man went about through life with a placenta protruding from its under surface; the placenta is a secondary outgrowth to enable the embryo to live in the womb. Such “secondary” changes are known as falsifications of development; they may be likened to interpolations made by some later writer in an ancient historical document. But during the time that the embryo carries this extraordinary appendage, protruding from its under surface, its upper surface passes through a most interesting series of changes. Its mouth at first resembles that of a shark, and the nostrils, as in the shark, are connected with the edges of the mouth by grooves. Then the head grows to be like that of the tadpole, and, just as in the young tadpole, this head is divided from the body by a
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