behind the old mill, whose overshot wheel, backed by a wall thickly covered with the young creeping fronds of hart's-tongue ferns, forms such a picturesque foreground for the view of our little valley, the mill-stream expands into a small shallow pond, overhung at its edges by thick-set hazel-bushes and clambering honeysuckle. of course it is only dammed back by a mud wall, with sluices for the miller's water-power; but it has a certain rustic simplicity of its own, which makes it beautiful to our eyes for all that, in spite of its utilitarian origin. at the bottom of this shallow pond you may now see a miracle daily taking place, which but for its commonness we should regard as an almost incredible marvel. you may there behold evolution actually illustrating the transformation of life under your very eyes: you may watch a low type of gill-breathing gristly-boned fish developing into the highest form of lung-breathing terrestrial amphibian. nay, more—you may almost discover the earliest known ancestor of the whole vertebrate kind, the first cousin of that once famous ascidian larva, passing through all the upward stages of existence which finally lead it to assume the shape of a relatively perfect four-legged animal. for the pond is swarming with fat black tadpoles, which are just at this moment losing their tails and developing their legs, on the way to becoming fully formed frogs.
the tadpole and the ascidian larva divide between them the honour of preserving for us in all its native simplicity the primitive aspect of the vertebrate type. beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes have all descended from an animal whose shape closely resembled that of these wriggling little black creatures which dart up and down like imps through the clear water, and raise a cloud of mud above their heads each time that they bury themselves comfortably in the soft mud of the bottom. but while the birds and beasts, on the one hand, have gone on bettering themselves out of all knowledge, and while the ascidian, on the other hand, in his adult form has dropped back into an obscure and sedentary life—sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything—the tadpole alone, at least during its early days, remains true to the ancestral traditions of the vertebrate family. when first it emerges from its egg it represents the very most rudimentary animal with a backbone known to our scientific teachers. it has a big hammer-looking head, and a set of branching outside gills, and a short distinct body, and a long semi-transparent tail. its backbone is a mere gristly channel, in which lies its spinal cord. as it grows, it resembles in every particular the ascidian larva, with which, indeed, kowalewsky and professor ray lankester have demonstrated its essential identity. but since a great many people seem wrongly to imagine that professor lankester's opinion on this matter is in some way at variance with mr. darwin's and dr. haeckel's, it may be well to consider what the degeneracy of the ascidian really means. the fact is, both larval forms—that of the frog and that of the ascidian—completely agree in the position of their brains, their gill-slits, their very rudimentary backbones, and their spinal cords. moreover, we ourselves and the tadpole agree with the ascidian in a further most important point, which no invertebrate animal shares with us; and that is that our eyes grow out of our brains, instead of being part of our skin, as in insects and cuttle-fish. this would seem à priori a most inconvenient place for an eye—inside the brain; but then, as professor lankester cleverly suggests, our common original ancestor, the very earliest vertebrate of all, must have been a transparent creature, and therefore comparatively indifferent as to the part of his body in which his eye happened to be placed. in after ages, however, as vertebrates generally got to have thicker skulls and tougher skins, the eye-bearing part of the brain had to grow outward, and so reach the light on the surface of the body: a thing which actually happens to all birds, beasts, and reptiles in the course of their embryonic development. so that in this respect the ascidian larva is nearer to the original type than the tadpole or any other existing animal.
the ascidian, however, in mature life, has grown degraded and fallen from his high estate, owing to his bad habit of rooting himself to a rock and there settling down into a mere sedentary swallower of passing morsels—a blind, handless, footless, and degenerate thing. in his later shape he is but a sack fixed to a stone, and with all his limbs and higher sense-organs so completely atrophied that only his earlier history allows us to recognise him as a vertebrate by descent at all. he is in fact a representative of retrogressive development. the tadpole, on the contrary, goes on swimming about freely, and keeping the use of its eyes, till at last a pair of hind legs and then a pair of fore legs begin to bud out from its side, and its tail fades away, and its gills disappear, and air-breathing lungs take their place, and it boldly hops on shore a fully evolved tailless amphibian.
there is, however, one interesting question about these two larv? which i should much like to solve. the ascidian has only one eye inside its useless brain, while the tadpole and all other vertebrates have two from the very first. now which of us most nearly represents the old mud-loving vertebrate ancestor in this respect? have two original organs coalesced in the young ascidian, or has one organ split up into a couple with the rest of the class? i think the latter is the true supposition, and for this reason: in our heads, and those of all vertebrates, there is a curious cross-connection between the eyes and the brain, so that the right optic nerve goes to the left side of the brain and the left optic nerve goes to the right side. in higher animals, this 'decussation,' as anatomists call it, affects all the sense-organs except those of smell; but in fishes it only affects the eyes. now, as the young ascidian has retained the ancestral position of his almost useless eye so steadily, it is reasonable to suppose that he has retained its other peculiarities as well. may we not conclude, therefore, that the primitive vertebrate had only one brain-eye; but that afterwards, as this brain-eye grew outward to the surface, it split up into two, because of the elongated and flattened form of the head in swimming animals, while its two halves still kept up a memory of their former union in the cross-connection with the opposite halves of the brain? if this be so, then we might suppose that the other organs followed suit, so as to prevent confusion in the brain between the two sides of the body; while the nose, which stands in the centre of the face, was under no liability to such error, and therefore still keeps up its primitive direct arrangement.
it is worth noting, too, that these tadpoles, like all other very low vertebrates, are mud-haunters; and the most primitive among adult vertebrates are still cartilaginous mud-fish. not much is known geologically about the predecessors of frogs; the tailless amphibians are late arrivals upon earth, and it may seem curious, therefore, that they should recall in so many ways the earliest ancestral type. the reason doubtless is because they are so much given to larval development. some ancestors of theirs—prim?val newts or salamanders—must have gone on for countless centuries improving themselves in their adult shape from age to age, yet bringing all their young into the world from the egg, as mere mud-fish still, in much the same state as their unimproved forefathers had done millions of ?ons before. similarly, caterpillars are still all but exact patterns of the prim?val insect, while butterflies are totally different and far higher creatures. thus, in spite of adult degeneracy in the ascidian and adult progress in the frog, both tadpoles preserve for us very nearly the original form of their earliest backboned ancestor. each individual recapitulates in its own person the whole history of evolution in its race. this is a very lucky thing for biology; since without these recapitulatory phases we could never have traced the true lines of descent in many cases. it would be a real misfortune for science if every frog had been born a typical amphibian, as some tree-toads actually are, and if every insect had emerged a fully formed adult, as some aphides very nearly do. larv? and embryos show us the original types of each race; adults show us the total amount of change produced by progressive or retrogressive development.
