Embryology: the Beginnings of Life

CHAPTER I. The Cell and the Individual

THE CELL AND THE INDIVIDUAL

What is Embryology, and what is its significance or interest to the ordinary educated man and woman? The answer to the question is the justification for the appearance of the following pages, and one may regard it as a somewhat striking fact, that in the production of a series of works of which this volume is one, those responsible for the subjects should have deemed it advisable to include Embryology.

Embryology may be defined as that part of the science of Biology which deals with the formation of a new individual or embryo. The definition itself ought to be sufficient to explain the significance of the subject for every one, because one can hardly conceive of any more profoundly important knowledge than that which tells of the mode of origin, manner of growth, and ultimate birth of an entirely new being. In the absence of such accurate knowledge it is quite obvious that all one's ideas concerning the manner in which the new individual is to be treated must have a more or less haphazard, or at least empirical, basis. In fact only when the science of Embryology, or the development of the individual, becomes a part of the ordinary everyday mental equipment of those who are responsible for bringing into the world new individuals, and subsequently protecting and handling them, will it be reasonable to expect that these new individuals are dealt with in the best possible manner. In a word it is evident that education, using that term in the very widest possible sense, can never be anything more than a blind groping in the dark until those into whose hands it is entrusted realise and know at least the most important fundamental facts concerning development. It is lack of this kind of knowledge which has been responsible for so much of the mistaken systems of the past in dealing with the young, and it is the spread of this knowledge which alone is the hope of better things in the future. Wherever knowledge is absent superstition is rife, and in no sphere of life is this more painfully obvious than in connection with the subject which we are about to study. It would have been entirely impossible for many of the stupid and even cruel methods of mental and physical treatment which have been meted out to the young children in the past to have been tolerated for a moment had this knowledge been available and sufficiently widespread. Possessing it, a flood of light is thrown upon the fascinating and otherwise obscure problems of heredity; and thus it lays open the pages of the past for those who care to read them. Possessing it also it throws upon the mental screen pictures of possibilities in the future for all those who have eyes to see. So the study of Embryology links up the past with the present and joins the present with the future. Is it not, therefore, obvious that the study of such a subject means dealing with problems the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate; problems which the parent, the teacher, the social reformer, the politician, and the philanthropist will grapple with in vain unless they call in science to their aid? Such is the meaning and significance of the subject of our study.

In the widest sense of the word Embryology, therefore, deals with all manner of living things, be they plant or animal. But since our purpose here is to state, as far as possible in the space at our disposal, the facts which are of particular importance in relation to the human subject, we shall only glance at the rest of living creatures. A brief look at them, however, is quite necessary in order to appreciate what follows. Let us be quite clear of what we are in search. We want to know as far as possible what it is that goes to the making of a man. What is the origin of the new individual? Where does the embryo come from? What elements are concerned in its formation? Where do these elements come from? How are they subsequently built up into the type of the species to which they belong? From what source do they gain their nourishment? What influences of a degenerative nature are likely to affect them? These are the questions which it is the business of the Embryologist to answer, and these are the questions the answers to which afford the explanation of man in the making. Surely they merely require to be stated that their significance may be appreciated.

We may now glance very briefly at the simplest facts which bear upon the subject, and which must precede our detailed study. The necessity for reproduction and development is involved in the universal fact of death. In all except the very simplest forms of life--those consisting of one simple mass of protoplasm--the individual sooner or later perishes, and if it were not that there were some methods by means of which the individuals could give rise to new individuals obviously the species would come to an end. No matter to what great age an individual animal may live, and there are some such as the tortoises which do live for centuries, sooner or later death overtakes them, and in all, investigation of their structure shows that nature has made provision for the carrying on of the race by means of new individuals.

Every living creature, be that creature simple or complicated, animal or vegetable, man or a jellyfish, starts life as one single cell. The very simplest living individuals never consist of anything else but one single cell, and it is in these primitive forms of life alone that what we call death can not be said to occur. Such a simple cell, after living for a certain period, simply divides itself into two halves, each of which gradually assumes the size and shape of what we may term the parent cell. The first individual has simply become two separate individuals. These two in their turn after another period of independent existence, again each divide, thus giving rise to four, and so on. Now here, although the original parent cell no longer exists as a cell, the actual material of which it was composed still exists in the cells which came into existence as the result of this division. The original cell, therefore, may be literally said to have been deathless, or immortal, though not everlasting. This is a profound thought, and one which must be grasped at the very commencement of our study of development, because it is one to which we shall have to recur again and again when we come to study the cells which give rise to human beings, in whom, too, there is a deathless continuity of cell protoplasm, or germ-plasm as it is then called. It is upon this fact that the whole science of Embryology depends.

The important idea to be learned from observing this process of reproduction in the single-celled animal is this: that there is nothing here which we may term the body of an animal as opposed to any of its parts. The one cell is both body and organs, and everything else; in itself it has the capacity of performing all the functions necessary for life, including that of reproduction for the perpetuation of the species. No part of the cell is set on one side for any special purpose such as happens in the bodies of higher animals. There are no special elements which go to the producing of the next generation, none of the cells which in a mammal, for example, we call "germ-cells." The whole individual is one cell. In fact one might almost say that there is no individual, but only race, or if we regard the cell as an individual then it is all germ-plasm. That is the important fact to be learned in the reproduction of single cells.

There are some single cells, such as those of the yeast, which reproduce in a slightly different manner, namely, by budding off a portion of themselves and finally becoming separate, and this might be regarded as a slightly higher stage, in so far as the original cell from which the bud came may be still identified; but in reality the process differs very little from that first described.

Then we may note that very low in the scale of living things there is a process of reproduction known as conjugation, in which, although the cells of the species appear to be all alike, yet, nevertheless, two of them join together for purposes of reproduction. In other words we have here a process of cell-union before we have the cell-division which follows. It is important to note at this stage that the creatures which we have mentioned, and even some more highly organised, such as an amba, which has a nucleus, go through these simple or complicated reproductive processes in the total absence of anything which could suggest a distinction of sex. In these cases the individuals are obviously all of one sex, and, therefore, the distinction of sexes into male and female is evidently something which has been added later in the scheme of evolution, not for the purpose of reproduction itself, but for something which is to be added to that.

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