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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Present Condition of Organic Nature
+
+#11 in our series by Thomas H. Huxley
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+Title:  The Present Condition of Organic Nature
+
+
+
+Author:  Thomas H. Huxley
+
+
+
+Release Date:  November, 2001  [Etext #2921]
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+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
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+Edition:  10
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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Present Condition of Organic Nature
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+EDITOR'S NOTE
+
+
+
+Of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley,
+
+son of an Ealing schoolmaster, was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His
+
+researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his
+
+pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably
+
+had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And
+
+yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his
+
+father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of
+
+education.  "I had," he said, "two years of a pandemonium of a school
+
+(between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any
+
+intellectual direction till I reached manhood."  When he was twelve a
+
+craving for reading found satisfaction in Hutton's "Geology," and when
+
+fifteen in Hamilton's "Logic."
+
+
+
+At seventeen Huxley entered as a student at Charing Cross Hospital, and
+
+three years later he was M.B. and the possessor of the gold medal for
+
+anatomy and physiology.  An appointment as surgeon in the navy proved
+
+to be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career, for he was
+
+gazetted to the "Rattlesnake", commissioned for surveying work in
+
+Torres Straits.  He was attracted by the teeming surface life of
+
+tropical seas and his study of it was the commencement of that
+
+revolution in scientific knowledge ultimately brought about by his
+
+researches.
+
+
+
+Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, and died at
+
+Eastbourne June 29, 1895.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LECTURES AND ESSAYS BY T.H. HUXLEY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTICE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+
+The Publisher of these interesting Lectures, having made an arrangement
+
+for their publication with Mr. J. A. Mays, the Reporter, begs to append
+
+the following note from Professor Huxley:--
+
+
+
+"Mr. J. Aldous Mays, who is taking shorthand notes of my 'Lectures to
+
+Working Men,' has asked me to allow him, on his own account, to print
+
+those Notes for the use of my audience.  I willingly accede to this
+
+request, on the understanding that a notice is prefixed to the effect
+
+that I have no leisure to revise the Lectures, or to make alterations
+
+in them, beyond the correction of any important error in a matter of
+
+fact."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.
+
+
+
+When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six
+
+lectures [*To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863.]
+
+which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you, it occurred
+
+to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a
+
+true light, or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call, that
+
+which I conceive myself to be the true light, the position of a book
+
+which has been more praised and more abused, perhaps, than any book
+
+which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the
+
+"Origin of Species".  That work, I doubt not, many of you have read;
+
+for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife among you.  At any rate,
+
+all of you will have heard of it,--some by one kind of report and some
+
+by another kind of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of
+
+all have been probably more or less excited on the subject of that
+
+work.  All I can do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put before
+
+you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man, who, of
+
+course, is liable to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one whose
+
+business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this
+
+nature.
+
+
+
+And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive
+
+subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number
+
+of lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to
+
+preliminary matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of
+
+those principles which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or
+
+less directly before us.  I have no right to suppose that all or any of
+
+you are naturalists; and even if you were, the misconceptions and
+
+misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists on these matters
+
+would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to
+
+take,--that I should start from the beginning,--that I should endeavour
+
+to point out what is the existing state of the organic world,--that I
+
+should point out its past condition,--that I should state what is the
+
+precise nature of the undertaking which Mr. Darwin has taken in hand;
+
+that I should endeavour to show you what are the only methods by which
+
+that undertaking can be brought to an issue, and to point out to you
+
+how far the author of the work in question has satisfied those
+
+conditions, how far he has not satisfied them, how far they are
+
+satisfiable by man, and how far they are not satisfiable by man.
+
+
+
+To-night, in taking up the first part of this question, I shall
+
+endeavour to put before you a sort of broad notion of our knowledge of
+
+the condition of the living world.  There are many ways of doing this.
+
+I might deal with it pictorially and graphically.  Following the
+
+example of Humboldt in his "Aspects of Nature", I might endeavour to
+
+point out the infinite variety of organic life in every mode of its
+
+existence, with reference to the variations of climate and the like;
+
+and such an attempt would be fraught with interest to us all; but
+
+considering the subject before us, such a course would not be that best
+
+calculated to assist us.  In an argument of this kind we must go
+
+further and dig deeper into the matter; we must endeavour to look into
+
+the foundations of living Nature, if I may so say, and discover the
+
+principles involved in some of her most secret operations.  I propose,
+
+therefore, in the first place, to take some ordinary animal with which
+
+you are all familiar, and, by easily comprehensible and obvious
+
+examples drawn from it, to show what are the kind of problems which
+
+living beings in general lay before us; and I shall then show you that
+
+the same problems are laid open to us by all kinds of living beings.
+
+But first, let me say in what sense I have used the words "organic
+
+nature." In speaking of the causes which lead to our present knowledge
+
+of organic nature, I have used it almost as an equivalent of the word
+
+"living," and for this reason,--that in almost all living beings you
+
+can distinguish several distinct portions set apart to do particular
+
+things and work in a particular way.  These are termed "organs," and
+
+the whole together is called "organic."  And as it is universally
+
+characteristic of them, this term "organic" has been very conveniently
+
+employed to denote the whole of living nature,--the whole of the plant
+
+world, and the whole of the animal world.
+
+
+
+Few animals can be more familiar to you than that whose skeleton is
+
+shown on our diagram.  You need not bother yourselves with this "Equus
+
+caballus" written under it; that is only the Latin name of it, and does
+
+not make it any better.  It simply means the common Horse. Suppose we
+
+wish to understand all about the Horse.  Our first object must be to
+
+study the structure of the animal.  The whole of his body is inclosed
+
+within a hide, a skin covered with hair; and if that hide or skin be
+
+taken off, we find a great mass of flesh, or what is technically called
+
+muscle, being the substance which by its power of contraction enables
+
+the animal to move.  These muscles move the hard parts one upon the
+
+other, and so give that strength and power of motion which renders the
+
+Horse so useful to us in the performance of those services in which we
+
+employ him.
+
+
+
+And then, on separating and removing the whole of this skin and flesh,
+
+you have a great series of bones, hard structures, bound together with
+
+ligaments, and forming the skeleton which is represented here.
+
+
+
+[FIGURE 1.  (Section through a horse.)
+
+
+
+FIGURE 2.  (Section through a cell.)]
+
+
+
+In that skeleton there are a number of parts to be recognized.  The
+
+long series of bones, beginning from the skull and ending in the tail,
+
+is called the spine, and those in front are the ribs; and then there
+
+are two pairs of limbs, one before and one behind; and there are what
+
+we all know as the fore-legs and the hind-legs.  If we pursue our
+
+researches into the interior of this animal, we find within the
+
+framework of the skeleton a great cavity, or rather, I should say, two
+
+great cavities,--one cavity beginning in the skull and running through
+
+the neck-bones, along the spine, and ending in the tail, containing the
+
+brain and the spinal marrow, which are extremely important organs. The
+
+second great cavity, commencing with the mouth, contains the gullet,
+
+the stomach, the long intestine, and all the rest of those internal
+
+apparatus which are essential for digestion; and then in the same great
+
+cavity, there are lodged the heart and all the great vessels going from
+
+it; and, besides that, the organs of respiration-- the lungs: and then
+
+the kidneys, and the organs of reproduction, and so on.  Let us now
+
+endeavour to reduce this notion of a horse that we now have, to some
+
+such kind of simple expression as can be at once, and without
+
+difficulty, retained in the mind, apart from all minor details.  If I
+
+make a transverse section, that is, if I were to saw a dead horse
+
+across, I should find that, if I left out the details, and supposing I
+
+took my section through the anterior region, and through the
+
+fore-limbs, I should have here this kind of section of the body (Fig.
+
+1).  Here would be the upper part of the animal--that great mass of
+
+bones that we spoke of as the spine (a, Fig. 1).  Here I should have
+
+the alimentary canal (b, Fig. 1).  Here I should have the heart (c,
+
+Fig. 1); and then you see, there would be a kind of double tube, the
+
+whole being inclosed within the hide; the spinal marrow would be placed
+
+in the upper tube (a, Fig. 1), and in the lower tube (d d, Fig.  1),
+
+there would be the alimentary canal (b), and the heart (c); and here I
+
+shall have the legs proceeding from each side.  For simplicity's sake,
+
+I represent them merely as stumps (e e, Fig. 1). Now that is a
+
+horse--as mathematicians would say--reduced to its most simple
+
+expression.  Carry that in your minds, if you please, as a simplified
+
+idea of the structure of the Horse.  The considerations which I have
+
+now put before you belong to what we technically call the 'Anatomy' of
+
+the Horse.  Now, suppose we go to work upon these several parts,--flesh
+
+and hair, and skin and bone, and lay open these various organs with our
+
+scalpels, and examine them by means of our magnifying- glasses, and see
+
+what we can make of them.  We shall find that the flesh is made up of
+
+bundles of strong fibres.  The brain and nerves, too, we shall find,
+
+are made up of fibres, and these queer-looking things that are called
+
+ganglionic corpuscles.  If we take a slice of the bone and examine it,
+
+we shall find that it is very like this diagram of a section of the
+
+bone of an ostrich, though differing, of course, in some details; and
+
+if we take any part whatsoever of the tissue, and examine it, we shall
+
+find it all has a minute structure, visible only under the microscope.
+
+All these parts constitute microscopic anatomy or 'Histology.'  These
+
+parts are constantly being changed; every part is constantly growing,
+
+decaying, and being replaced during the life of the animal.  The tissue
+
+is constantly replaced by new material; and if you go back to the young
+
+state of the tissue in the case of muscle, or in the case of skin, or
+
+any of the organs I have mentioned, you will find that they all come
+
+under the same condition.  Every one of these microscopic filaments and
+
+fibres (I now speak merely of the general character of the whole
+
+process)-- every one of these parts--could be traced down to some
+
+modification of a tissue which can be readily divided into little
+
+particles of fleshy matter, of that substance which is composed of the
+
+chemical elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, having such
+
+a shape as this (Fig. 2).  These particles, into which all primitive
+
+tissues break up, are called cells.  If I were to make a section of a
+
+piece of the skin of my hand, I should find that it was made up of
+
+these cells.  If I examine the fibres which form the various organs of
+
+all living animals, I should find that all of them, at one time or
+
+other, had been formed out of a substance consisting of similar
+
+elements; so that you see, just as we reduced the whole body in the
+
+gross to that sort of simple expression given in Fig. 1, so we may
+
+reduce the whole of the microscopic structural elements to a form of
+
+even greater simplicity; just as the plan of the whole body may be so
+
+represented in a sense (Fig. 1), so the primary structure of every
+
+tissue may be represented by a mass of cells (Fig. 2).
+
+
+
+Having thus, in this sort of general way, sketched to you what I may
+
+call, perhaps, the architecture of the body of the Horse (what we term
+
+technically its Morphology), I must now turn to another aspect.  A
+
+horse is not a mere dead structure: it is an active, living, working
+
+machine.  Hitherto we have, as it were, been looking at a steam-engine
+
+with the fires out, and nothing in the boiler; but the body of the
+
+living animal is a beautifully-formed active machine, and every part
+
+has its different work to do in the working of that machine, which is
+
+what we call its life.  The Horse, if you see him after his day's work
+
+is done, is cropping the grass in the fields, as it may be, or munching
+
+the oats in his stable.  What is he doing?  His jaws are working as a
+
+mill--and a very complex mill too--grinding the corn, or crushing the
+
+grass to a pulp.  As soon as that operation has taken place, the food
+
+is passed down to the stomach, and there it is mixed with the chemical
+
+fluid called the gastric juice, a substance which has the peculiar
+
+property of making soluble and dissolving out the nutritious matter in
+
+the grass, and leaving behind those parts which are not nutritious; so
+
+that you have, first, the mill, then a sort of chemical digester; and
+
+then the food, thus partially dissolved, is carried back by the
+
+muscular contractions of the intestines into the hinder parts of the
+
+body, while the soluble portions are taken up into the blood.  The
+
+blood is contained in a vast system of pipes, spreading through the
+
+whole body, connected with a force pump,--the heart,--which, by its
+
+position and by the contractions of its valves, keeps the blood
+
+constantly circulating in one direction, never allowing it to rest; and
+
+then, by means of this circulation of the blood, laden as it is with
+
+the products of digestion, the skin, the flesh, the hair, and every
+
+other part of the body, draws from it that which it wants, and every
+
+one of these organs derives those materials which are necessary to
+
+enable it to do its work.
+
+
+
+The action of each of these organs, the performance of each of these
+
+various duties, involve in their operation a continual absorption of
+
+the matters necessary for their support, from the blood, and a constant
+
+formation of waste products, which are returned to the blood, and
+
+conveyed by it to the lungs and the kidneys, which are organs that have
+
+allotted to them the office of extracting, separating, and getting rid
+
+of these waste products; and thus the general nourishment, labour, and
+
+repair of the whole machine is kept up with order and regularity.  But
+
+not only is it a machine which feeds and appropriates to its own
+
+support the nourishment necessary to its existence--it is an engine for
+
+locomotive purposes.  The Horse desires to go from one place to
+
+another; and to enable it to do this, it has those strong contractile
+
+bundles of muscles attached to the bones of its limbs, which are put in
+
+motion by means of a sort of telegraphic apparatus formed by the brain
+
+and the great spinal cord running through the spine or backbone; and to
+
+this spinal cord are attached a number of fibres termed nerves, which
+
+proceed to all parts of the structure.  By means of these the eyes,
+
+nose, tongue, and skin--all the organs of perception--transmit
+
+impressions or sensations to the brain, which acts as a sort of great
+
+central telegraph-office, receiving impressions and sending messages to
+
+all parts of the body, and putting in motion the muscles necessary to
+
+accomplish any movement that may be desired.  So that you have here an
+
+extremely complex and beautifully-proportioned machine, with all its
+
+parts working harmoniously together towards one common object--the
+
+preservation of the life of the animal.
+
+
+
+Now, note this: the Horse makes up its waste by feeding, and its food
+
+is grass or oats, or perhaps other vegetable products; therefore, in
+
+the long run, the source of all this complex machinery lies in the
+
+vegetable kingdom.  But where does the grass, or the oat, or any other
+
+plant, obtain this nourishing food-producing material?  At first it is
+
+a little seed, which soon begins to draw into itself from the earth and
+
+the surrounding air matters which in themselves contain no vital
+
+properties whatever; it absorbs into its own substance water, an
+
+inorganic body; it draws into its substance carbonic acid, an inorganic
+
+matter; and ammonia, another inorganic matter, found in the air; and
+
+then, by some wonderful chemical process, the details of which chemists
+
+do not yet understand, though they are near foreshadowing them, it
+
+combines them into one substance, which is known to us as 'Protein,' a
+
+complex compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which alone
+
+possesses the property of manifesting vitality and of permanently
+
+supporting animal life.  So that, you see, the waste products of the
+
+animal economy, the effete materials which are continually being thrown
+
+off by all living beings, in the form of organic matters, are
+
+constantly replaced by supplies of the necessary repairing and
+
+rebuilding materials drawn from the plants, which in their turn
+
+manufacture them, so to speak, by a mysterious combination of those
+
+same inorganic materials.
+
+
+
+Let us trace out the history of the Horse in another direction.  After
+
+a certain time, as the result of sickness or disease, the effect of
+
+accident, or the consequence of old age, sooner or later, the animal
+
+dies.  The multitudinous operations of this beautiful mechanism flag in
+
+their performance, the Horse loses its vigour, and after passing
+
+through the curious series of changes comprised in its formation and
+
+preservation, it finally decays, and ends its life by going back into
+
+that inorganic world from which all but an inappreciable fraction of
+
+its substance was derived.  Its bones become mere carbonate and
+
+phosphate of lime; the matter of its flesh, and of its other parts,
+
+becomes, in the long run, converted into carbonic acid, into water, and
+
+into ammonia.  You will now, perhaps, understand the curious relation
+
+of the animal with the plant, of the organic with the inorganic world,
+
+which is shown in this diagram (Fig. 3).
+
+
+
+[FIGURE 3. (Diagram showing material relationship of the Vegetable,
+
+Animal and Inorganic Worlds.)]
+
+
+
+The plant gathers these inorganic materials together and makes them up
+
+into its own substance.  The animal eats the plant and appropriates the
+
+nutritious portions to its own sustenance, rejects and gets rid of the
+
+useless matters; and, finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole
+
+body is decomposed and returned into the inorganic world.  There is
+
+thus a constant circulation from one to the other, a continual
+
+formation of organic life from inorganic matters, and as constant a
+
+return of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic world; so that
+
+the materials of which our bodies are composed are largely, in all
+
+probability, the substances which constituted the matter of long
+
+extinct creations, but which have in the interval constituted a part of
+
+the inorganic world.
+
+
+
+Thus we come to the conclusion, strange at first sight, that the MATTER
+
+constituting the living world is identical with that which forms the
+
+inorganic world.  And not less true is it that, remarkable as are the
+
+powers or, in other words, as are the FORCES which are exerted by
+
+living beings, yet all these forces are either identical with those
+
+which exist in the inorganic world, or they are convertible into them;
+
+I mean in just the same sense as the researches of physical
+
+philosophers have shown that heat is convertible into electricity, that
+
+electricity is convertible into magnetism, magnetism into mechanical
+
+force or chemical force, and any one of them with the other, each being
+
+measurable in terms of the other,--even so, I say, that great law is
+
+applicable to the living world.  Consider why is the skeleton of this
+
+horse capable of supporting the masses of flesh and the various organs
+
+forming the living body, unless it is because of the action of the same
+
+forces of cohesion which combines together the particles of matter
+
+composing this piece of chalk?  What is there in the muscular
+
+contractile power of the animal but the force which is expressible, and
+
+which is in a certain sense convertible, into the force of gravity
+
+which it overcomes?  Or, if you go to more hidden processes, in what
+
+does the process of digestion differ from those processes which are
+
+carried on in the laboratory of the chemist?  Even if we take the most
+
+recondite and most complex operations of animal life--those of the
+
+nervous system, these of late years have been shown to be--I do not say
+
+identical in any sense with the electrical processes--but this has been
+
+shown, that they are in some way or other associated with them; that is
+
+to say, that every amount of nervous action is accompanied by a certain
+
+amount of electrical disturbance in the particles of the nerves in
+
+which that nervous action is carried on. In this way the nervous action
+
+is related to electricity in the same way that heat is related to
+
+electricity; and the same sort of argument which demonstrates the two
+
+latter to be related to one another shows that the nervous forces are
+
+correlated to electricity; for the experiments of M. Dubois Reymond and
+
+others have shown that whenever a nerve is in a state of excitement,
+
+sending a message to the muscles or conveying an impression to the
+
+brain, there is a disturbance of the electrical condition of that nerve
+
+which does not exist at other times; and there are a number of other
+
+facts and phenomena of that sort; so that we come to the broad
+
+conclusion that not only as to living matter itself, but as to the
+
+forces that matter exerts, there is a close relationship between the
+
+organic and the inorganic world--the difference between them arising
+
+from the diverse combination and disposition of identical forces, and
+
+not from any primary diversity, so far as we can see.
+
+
+
+I said just now that the Horse eventually died and became converted
+
+into the same inorganic substances from whence all but an inappreciable
+
+fraction of its substance demonstrably originated, so that the actual
+
+wanderings of matter are as remarkable as the transmigrations of the
+
+soul fabled by Indian tradition.  But before death has occurred, in the
+
+one sex or the other, and in fact in both, certain products or parts of
+
+the organism have been set free, certain parts of the organisms of the
+
+two sexes have come into contact with one another, and from that
+
+conjunction, from that union which then takes place, there results the
+
+formation of a new being.  At stated times the mare, from a particular
+
+part of the interior of her body, called the ovary, gets rid of a
+
+minute particle of matter comparable in all essential respects with
+
+that which we called a cell a little while since, which cell contains a
+
+kind of nucleus in its centre, surrounded by a clear space and by a
+
+viscid mass of protein substance (Fig. 2); and though it is different
+
+in appearance from the eggs which we are mostly acquainted with, it is
+
+really an egg.  After a time this minute particle of matter, which may
+
+only be a small fraction of a grain in weight, undergoes a series of
+
+changes,--wonderful, complex changes.  Finally, upon its surface there
+
+is fashioned a little elevation, which afterwards becomes divided and
+
+marked by a groove. The lateral boundaries of the groove extend upwards
+
+and downwards, and at length give rise to a double tube.  In the upper
+
+smaller tube the spinal marrow and brain are fashioned; in the lower,
+
+the alimentary canal and heart; and at length two pairs of buds shoot
+
+out at the sides of the body, which are the rudiments of the limbs.  In
+
+fact a true drawing of a section of the embryo in this state would in
+
+all essential respects resemble that diagram of a horse reduced to its
+
+simplest expression, which I first placed before you (Fig. 1).
+
+
+
+Slowly and gradually these changes take place.  The whole of the body,
+
+at first, can be broken up into "cells," which become in one place
+
+metamorphosed into muscle,--in another place into gristle and bone,--in
+
+another place into fibrous tissue,--and in another into hair; every
+
+part becoming gradually and slowly fashioned, as if there were an
+
+artificer at work in each of these complex structures that we have
+
+mentioned.  This embryo, as it is called, then passes into other
+
+conditions.  I should tell you that there is a time when the embryos of
+
+neither dog, nor horse, nor porpoise, nor monkey, nor man, can be
+
+distinguished by any essential feature one from the other; there is a
+
+time when they each and all of them resemble this one of the Dog.  But
+
+as development advances, all the parts acquire their speciality, till
+
+at length you have the embryo converted into the form of the parent
+
+from which it started.  So that you see, this living animal, this
+
+horse, begins its existence as a minute particle of nitrogenous matter,
+
+which, being supplied with nutriment (derived, as I have shown, from
+
+the inorganic world), grows up according to the special type and
+
+construction of its parents, works and undergoes a constant waste, and
+
+that waste is made good by nutriment derived from the inorganic world;
+
+the waste given off in this way being directly added to the inorganic
+
+world; and eventually the animal itself dies, and, by the process of
+
+decomposition, its whole body is returned to those conditions of
+
+inorganic matter in which its substance originated.
+
+
+
+This, then, is that which is true of every living form, from the lowest
+
+plant to the highest animal--to man himself.  You might define the life
+
+of every one in exactly the same terms as those which I have now used;
+
+the difference between the highest and the lowest being simply in the
+
+complexity of the developmental changes, the variety of the structural
+
+forms, the diversity of the physiological functions which are exerted
+
+by each.
+
+
+
+If I were to take an oak tree as a specimen of the plant world, I
+
+should find that it originated in an acorn, which, too, commenced in a
+
+cell; the acorn is placed in the ground, and it very speedily begins to
+
+absorb the inorganic matters I have named, adds enormously to its bulk,
+
+and we can see it, year after year, extending itself upward and
+
+downward, attracting and appropriating to itself inorganic materials,
+
+which it vivifies, and eventually, as it ripens, gives off its own
+
+proper acorns, which again run the same course.  But I need not
+
+multiply examples,--from the highest to the lowest the essential
+
+features of life are the same, as I have described in each of these
+
+cases.
+
+
+
+So much, then, for these particular features of the organic world,
+
+which you can understand and comprehend, so long as you confine
+
+yourself to one sort of living being, and study that only.
+
+
+
+But, as you know, horses are not the only living creatures in the
+
+world; and again, horses, like all other animals, have certain
+
+limits--are confined to a certain area on the surface of the earth on
+
+which we live,--and, as that is the simpler matter, I may take that
+
+first.  In its wild state, and before the discovery of America, when
+
+the natural state of things was interfered with by the Spaniards, the
+
+Horse was only to be found in parts of the earth which are known to
+
+geographers as the Old World; that is to say, you might meet with
+
+horses in Europe, Asia, or Africa; but there were none in Australia,
+
+and there were none whatsoever in the whole continent of America, from
+
+Labrador down to Cape Horn.  This is an empirical fact, and it is what
+
+is called, stated in the way I have given it you, the 'Geographical
+
+Distribution' of the Horse.
+
+
+
+Why horses should be found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and not in
+
+America, is not obvious; the explanation that the conditions of life in
+
+America are unfavourable to their existence, and that, therefore, they
+
+had not been created there, evidently does not apply; for when the
+
+invading Spaniards, or our own yeomen farmers, conveyed horses to these
+
+countries for their own use, they were found to thrive well and
+
+multiply very rapidly; and many are even now running wild in those
+
+countries, and in a perfectly natural condition.  Now, suppose we were
+
+to do for every animal what we have here done for the Horse,--that is,
+
+to mark off and distinguish the particular district or region to which
+
+each belonged; and supposing we tabulated all these results, that would
+
+be called the Geographical Distribution of animals, while a
+
+corresponding study of plants would yield as a result the Geographical
+
+Distribution of plants.
+
+
+
+I pass on from that now, as I merely wished to explain to you what I
+
+meant by the use of the term 'Geographical Distribution.'  As I said,
+
+there is another aspect, and a much more important one, and that is,
+
+the relations of the various animals to one another.  The Horse is a
+
+very well-defined matter-of-fact sort of animal, and we are all pretty
+
+familiar with its structure.  I dare say it may have struck you, that
+
+it resembles very much no other member of the animal kingdom, except
+
+perhaps the Zebra or the Ass.  But let me ask you to look along these
+
+diagrams.  Here is the skeleton of the Horse, and here the skeleton of
+
+the Dog.  You will notice that we have in the Horse a skull, a backbone
+
+and ribs, shoulder-blades and haunch-bones.  In the fore-limb, one
+
+upper arm-bone, two fore arm-bones, wrist-bones (wrongly called knee),
+
+and middle hand-bones, ending in the three bones of a finger, the last
+
+of which is sheathed in the horny hoof of the fore-foot: in the
+
+hind-limb, one thigh-bone, two leg-bones, anklebones, and middle
+
+foot-bones, ending in the three bones of a toe, the last of which is
+
+encased in the hoof of the hind-foot.  Now turn to the Dog's skeleton.
+
+We find identically the same bones, but more of them, there being more
+
+toes in each foot, and hence more toe-bones.
+
+
+
+Well, that is a very curious thing!  The fact is that the Dog and the
+
+Horse--when one gets a look at them without the outward impediments of
+
+the skin--are found to be made in very much the same sort of fashion.
+
+And if I were to make a transverse section of the Dog, I should find
+
+the same organs that I have already shown you as forming parts of the
+
+Horse.  Well, here is another skeleton--that of a kind of Lemur--you
+
+see he has just the same bones; and if I were to make a transverse
+
+section of it, it would be just the same again.  In your mind's eye
+
+turn him round, so as to put his backbone in a position inclined
+
+obliquely upwards and forwards, just as in the next three diagrams,
+
+which represent the skeletons of an Orang, a Chimpanzee, a Gorilla, and
+
+you find you have no trouble in identifying the bones throughout; and
+
+lastly turn to the end of the series, the diagram representing a man's
+
+skeleton, and still you find no great structural feature essentially
+
+altered.  There are the same bones in the same relations. From the
+
+Horse we pass on and on, with gradual steps, until we arrive at last at
+
+the highest known forms.  On the other hand, take the other line of
+
+diagrams, and pass from the Horse downwards in the scale to this fish;
+
+and still, though the modifications are vastly greater, the essential
+
+framework of the organization remains unchanged.  Here, for instance,
+
+is a Porpoise: here is its strong backbone, with the cavity running
+
+through it, which contains the spinal cord; here are the ribs, here the
+
+shoulder blade; here is the little short upper-arm bone, here are the
+
+two forearm bones, the wrist-bone, and the finger-bones.
+
+
+
+Strange, is it not, that the Porpoise should have in this queer-
+
+looking affair--its flapper (as it is called), the same fundamental
+
+elements as the fore-leg of the Horse or the Dog, or the Ape or Man;
+
+and here you will notice a very curious thing,--the hinder limbs are
+
+absent.  Now, let us make another jump.  Let us go to the Codfish:
+
+here you see is the forearm, in this large pectoral fin--carrying your
+
+mind's eye onward from the flapper of the Porpoise.  And here you have
+
+the hinder limbs restored in the shape of these ventral fins.  If I
+
+were to make a transverse section of this, I should find just the same
+
+organs that we have before noticed.  So that, you see, there comes out
+
+this strange conclusion as the result of our investigations, that the
+
+Horse, when examined and compared with other animals, is found by no
+
+means to stand alone in nature; but that there are an enormous number
+
+of other creatures which have backbones, ribs, and legs, and other
+
+parts arranged in the same general manner, and in all their formation
+
+exhibiting the same broad peculiarities.
+
+
+
+I am sure that you cannot have followed me even in this extremely
+
+elementary exposition of the structural relations of animals, without
+
+seeing what I have been driving at all through, which is, to show you
+
+that, step by step, naturalists have come to the idea of a unity of
+
+plan, or conformity of construction, among animals which appeared at
+
+first sight to be extremely dissimilar.
+
+
+
+And here you have evidence of such a unity of plan among all the
+
+animals which have backbones, and which we technically call
+
+"Vertebrata".  But there are multitudes of other animals, such as
+
+crabs, lobsters, spiders, and so on, which we term "Annulosa".  In
+
+these I could not point out to you the parts that correspond with those
+
+of the Horse,--the backbone, for instance,--as they are constructed
+
+upon a very different principle, which is also common to all of them;
+
+that is to say, the Lobster, the Spider, and the Centipede, have a
+
+common plan running through their whole arrangement, in just the same
+
+way that the Horse, the Dog, and the Porpoise assimilate to each other.
+
+
+
+Yet other creatures--whelks, cuttlefishes, oysters, snails, and all
+
+their tribe ("Mollusca")--resemble one another in the same way, but
+
+differ from both "Vertebrata" and "Annulosa"; and the like is true of
+
+the animals called "Coelenterata" (Polypes) and "Protozoa" (animalcules
+
+and sponges).
+
+
+
+Now, by pursuing this sort of comparison, naturalists have arrived at
+
+the conviction that there are,--some think five, and some seven,--but
+
+certainly not more than the latter number--and perhaps it is simpler to
+
+assume five--distinct plans or constructions in the whole of the animal
+
+world; and that the hundreds of thousands of species of creatures on
+
+the surface of the earth, are all reducible to those five, or, at most,
+
+seven, plans of organization.
+
+
+
+But can we go no further than that?  When one has got so far, one is
+
+tempted to go on a step and inquire whether we cannot go back yet
+
+further and bring down the whole to modifications of one primordial
+
+unit.  The anatomist cannot do this; but if he call to his aid the
+
+study of development, he can do it.  For we shall find that, distinct
+
+as those plans are, whether it be a porpoise or man, or lobster, or any
+
+of those other kinds I have mentioned, every one begins its existence
+
+with one and the same primitive form,--that of the egg, consisting, as
+
+we have seen, of a nitrogenous substance, having a small particle or
+
+nucleus in the centre of it.  Furthermore, the earlier changes of each
+
+are substantially the same.  And it is in this that lies that true
+
+"unity of organization" of the animal kingdom which has been guessed at
+
+and fancied for many years; but which it has been left to the present
+
+time to be demonstrated by the careful study of development. But is it
+
+possible to go another step further still, and to show that in the same
+
+way the whole of the organic world is reducible to one primitive
+
+condition of form?  Is there among the plants the same primitive form
+
+of organization, and is that identical with that of the animal
+
+kingdom?  The reply to that question, too, is not uncertain or
+
+doubtful.  It is now proved that every plant begins its existence under
+
+the same form; that is to say, in that of a cell--a particle of
+
+nitrogenous matter having substantially the same conditions.  So that
+
+if you trace back the oak to its first germ, or a man, or a horse, or
+
+lobster, or oyster, or any other animal you choose to name, you shall
+
+find each and all of these commencing their existence in forms
+
+essentially similar to each other: and, furthermore, that the first
+
+processes of growth, and many of the subsequent modifications, are
+
+essentially the same in principle in almost all.
+
+
+
+In conclusion, let me, in a few words, recapitulate the positions which
+
+I have laid down.  And you must understand that I have not been talking
+
+mere theory; I have been speaking of matters which are as plainly
+
+demonstrable as the commonest propositions of Euclid--of facts that
+
+must form the basis of all speculations and beliefs in Biological
+
+science.  We have gradually traced down all organic forms, or, in other
+
+words, we have analyzed the present condition of animated nature, until
+
+we found that each species took its origin in a form similar to that
+
+under which all the others commence their existence.  We have found the
+
+whole of the vast array of living forms, with which we are surrounded,
+
+constantly growing, increasing, decaying and disappearing; the animal
+
+constantly attracting, modifying, and applying to its sustenance the
+
+matter of the vegetable kingdom, which derived its support from the
+
+absorption and conversion of inorganic matter.  And so constant and
+
+universal is this absorption, waste, and reproduction, that it may be
+
+said with perfect certainty that there is left in no one of our bodies
+
+at the present moment a millionth part of the matter of which they were
+
+originally formed!  We have seen, again, that not only is the living
+
+matter derived from the inorganic world, but that the forces of that
+
+matter are all of them correlative with and convertible into those of
+
+inorganic nature.
+
+
+
+This, for our present purposes, is the best view of the present
+
+condition of organic nature which I can lay before you: it gives you
+
+the great outlines of a vast picture, which you must fill up by your
+
+own study.
+
+
+
+In the next lecture I shall endeavour in the same way to go back into
+
+the past, and to sketch in the same broad manner the history of life in
+
+epochs preceding our own.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of
+
+The Present Condition of Organic Nature by Thomas H. Huxley
+
+
+