principle that the fundamental organs have essentially the shape of tubular cavities, as appears in the first form of the central organ of the nervous system, in the two muscular and osseous tubes which form the walls of the body, and in the intestinal canal; and he followed out with admirable clearness the steps by which from these fundamental systems the other organs arise secondarily, such as the organs of sense, the glands, lungs, heart, vascular glands, Wolffian bodies, kidneys and generative organs.
To complete von Baer’s system there was mainly wanting a more minute knowledge of the intimate structure of the elementary tissues, but this had not yet been acquired by biologists, and it remained for Theodor Schwann of Liége in 1839, along with whom should be mentioned those who, like Robert Brown and M. J. Schleiden, prepared the way for his great discovery, to point out the uniformity in histological structure of the simpler forms of plants and animals, the nature of the organized animal and vegetable cell, the cellular constitution of the primitive ovum of animals, and the derivation of the various tissues, complex as well as simple, from the transformation or, as it is now called, differentiation of simple cellular elements,—discoveries which have exercised a powerful and lasting influence on the whole progress of biological knowledge in our time, and have contributed in an eminent degree to promote the advance of embryology itself.
To K. B. Reichert of Berlin more particularly is due the first application of the newer histological views to the explanation of the phenomena of development, 1840. To him and to R. A. von Kölliker and R. Virchow is due the ascertainment of the general principle that there is no free-cell formation in embryonic development and growth, but that all organs are derived from the multiplication, combination and transformation of cells, and that all cells giving rise to organs are the descendants or progeny of previously existing cells, and that these may be traced back to the original cell or cell-substance of the ovum.
It may be that modern research has somewhat modified the views taken by biologists of the statements of Schwann as to the constitution of the organized cell, especially as regards its simplest or most elementary form, and has indicated more exactly the nature of the protoplasmic material which constitutes its living basis; but it has not caused any very wide departure from the general principles enunciated by that physiologist. Schwann’s treatise, entitled Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growths of Animals and Plants, was published in German at Berlin in 1839, and was translated into English by Henry Smith, and printed for the Sydenham Society in 1847, along with a translation of Schleiden’s memoir, “Contributions to Phytogenesis,” which originally appeared in 1838 in Müller’s Archiv for that year, and which had also been published in English in Taylor and Francis’s Scientific Memoirs, vol. ii. part vi.
Among the newer observations of the same period which contributed to a more exact knowledge of the structure of the ovum itself may be mentioned—first the discovery of the germinal vesicle, or nucleus, in the germ-disk of birds by J. E. von Purkinje (Symbolae ad ovi avium historiam ante incubationem, Vratislaviae, 1825, and republished at Leipzig in 1830); second, von Baer’s discovery of the mammiferous ovum in 1827, already referred to; third, the discovery of the germinal vesicle of mammals by J. V. Coste in 1834, and its independent observation by Wharton Jones in 1835; and fourth, the observation in the same year by Rudolph Wagner of the germinal macula or nucleus. Coste’s discovery of the germinal vesicle of Mammalia was first communicated to the public in the Comptes rendus of the French Academy for 1833, and was more fully described in the Recherches sur la génération des mammifères, by Delpech and Coste (Paris, 1834). Thomas Wharton Jones’s observations, made in the autumn of 1834, without a knowledge of Coste’s communication, were presented to the Royal Society in 1835. This discovery was also confirmed and extended by G. G. Valentin and Bernardt, as recorded by the latter in his work Symb. ad ovi mammal. hist. ante praegnationem. Rudolph Wagner’s observations first appeared in his Textbook of Comparative Anatomy, published at Leipzig in 1834–1835, and in Müller’s Archiv for the latter year. His more extended researches are described in his work Prodromus hist. generationis hominis atque animalium (Leipzig, 1836), and in a memoir inserted in the Trans. of the Roy. Bavarian Acad. of Sciences (Munich, 1837).
The two decades of years from 1820 to 1840 were peculiarly fertile in contributions to the anatomy of the foetus and the progress of embryological knowledge. The researches of Prévost and Dumas on the ova and primary stages of development of Batrachia, birds and mammals, made as early as 1824, deserve especial notice as important steps in advance, both in the discovery of the process of yolk segmentation in the batrachian ovum, and in their having shown almost with the force of demonstration, previous to the discovery of the mammiferous ovarian ovum by von Baer, that that body must exist as a minute spherule in the Graafian follicle of the ovary, although they did not actually succeed in bringing the ova clearly under observation.
The works of Pockels (1825), of Seiler (1831), of G. Breschet (1832), of A. A. L. M. Velpeau (1833), of T. L. W. Bischoff (1834)—all bearing upon human embryology; the researches of Coste in comparative embryology in 1834, already referred to, and those published by the same author in 1837; the publication of Johannes Müller’s great work on physiology, and Rudolph Wagner’s smaller text-book, in both of which the subject of embryology received a very full treatment, together with the excellent Manual of the Development of the Foetus, by Valentin, in 1835, the first separate and systematic work on the whole subject, now secured to embryology its permanent place among the biological sciences on the Continent; while in this country attention was drawn to the subject by the memoirs of Allen Thomson (1831), Th. Wharton Jones (1835–1838) and Martin Barry (1839–1840).
Among the more remarkable special discoveries which belong to the period now referred to, a few may be mentioned, as, for example, that of the chorda dorsalis by von Baer, a most important one, which may be regarded as the key to the whole of vertebral morphology; the phenomenon of yolk segmentation, now known to be universal among animals, but which was only first carefully observed in Batrachia by Prévost and Dumas (though previously casually noticed by Swammerdam), and was soon afterwards followed out by Rusconi and von Baer in fishes; the discovery of the branchial clefts, plates and vascular arches in the embryos of the higher abranchiate animals by H. Rathke in 1825–1827; the able investigation of the transformations of these arches by Reichert in 1837; and the researches on the origin and development of the urinary and generative organs by Johannes Müller in 1829–1830.
On entering the fifth decade of the 19th century, the number of original contributions and systematic treatises becomes so great as to render the attempt to enumerate even a selection of the more important of them quite unsuitable to the limits of the present article. We must be satisfied, therefore, with a reference to one or two which seem to stand out with greater prominence than the rest as landmarks in the progress of embryological discovery. Among these may first be mentioned the researches of Theodor L. W. von Bischoff, formerly of Giessen and later of Munich, on the development of the ovum in Mammalia, in which a series of the most laborious, minute and accurate observations furnished a greatly novel and very full history of the formative process in several animals of that class. These researches are contained in four memoirs, treating separately of the development of the rabbit, the dog, the guinea-pig and the roe-deer, and appeared in succession in the years 1842, 1845, 1852 and 1854.
Next may be mentioned the great work of Coste, entitled Histoire gén. et particul. du développement des animaux, of which, however, only four fasciculi appeared between the years 1847 and 1859, leaving the work incomplete. In this work, in the large folio form, beautiful representations are given of the author’s valuable observations on human embryology, and on that of various mammals, birds and fishes, and of the author’s
