[3] ‘Principles of Zoology’ Part I. Comparative Physiology. By Louis Agassiz and A.A. Gould. Revised Edition. Boston, 1856.
[4] Agassiz’ own views have lately become essentially different, so far as can be made out from Rud. Wagner’s notice of his ‘Essay on Classification.’ Agassiz himself does not attempt any criticism of the above cited older views, which, however, are still widely diffused. With his recent conception I am unfortunately acquainted only from R. Wagner’s somewhat confused report, and have therefore thought it better not to attempt any critical remarks upon it.
CHAPTER XI.
ON THE PROGRESS OF EVOLUTION.
From this scarcely unavoidable but unsatisfactory side-glance upon the old school, which looks down with so great an air of superiority upon Darwin's “intellectual dream” and the “giddy enthusiasm” of its friends, I turn to the more congenial task of considering the developmental history of the Crustacea from the point of view of the Darwinian theory.
Darwin himself, in the thirteenth chapter of his book, has already discussed the conclusions derived from his hypotheses in the domain of developmental history. For a more detailed application of them, however, it is necessary in the first place to trace these general conclusions a little further than he has there done.
The changes by which young animals depart from their parents, and the gradual accumulation of which causes the production of new species, genera, and families, may occur at an earlier or later period of life,—in the young state, or at the period of sexual maturity. For the latter is by no means always, as in the Insecta, a period of repose; most other animals even then continue to grow and to undergo changes. (See above, the remarks on the males of the Amphipoda.) Some variations, indeed, from their very nature, can only occur when the young animal has attained the adult stage of development. Thus the Sea Caterpillars (Polynoë) at first possess only a few body-segments, which, during development, gradually increase to a number which is different in different species, but constant in the same species; now before a young animal could exceed the number of segments of its parents, it must of course have attained that number. We may assume a similar supplementary progress wherever the deviation of the descendants consists in an addition of new segments and limbs.
Descendants therefore reach a new goal, either by deviating sooner or later whilst still on the way towards the form of their parents, or by passing along this course without deviation, but then, instead of standing still, advance still farther.
The former mode will have had a predominant action where the posterity of common ancestors constitutes a group of forms standing upon the same level in essential features, as the whole of the Amphipoda, Crabs, or Birds. On the other hand we are led to the assumption of the second mode of progress, when we seek to deduce from a common original form, animals some of which agree with young states of others.
In the former case the developmental history of the descendants can only agree with that of their ancestors up to a certain point at which their courses separate,—as to their structure in the adult state it will teach us nothing. In the second case the entire development of the progenitors is also passed through by the descendants, and, therefore, so far as the production of a species depends upon this second mode of progress, the historical development of the species will be mirrored in its developmental history. In the short period of a few weeks or months, the changing forms of the embryo and larvæ will pass before us, a more or less complete and more or less true picture of the transformations through which the species, in the course of untold thousands of years, has struggled up to its present state.
