Fig. 2.—Early Development of Echinus, the Common Sea-urchin.

a.Two cells.
b.Four cells.
c.Eight cells, arranged in two rings of four, above one another.
d.Sixteen cells, four “micromeres” formed at the “vegetative” pole.
e.Optical section of the “blastula,” a hollow sphere consisting of about one thousand cells, each of them with a small cilium.

It is important to notice that the formation of the “blastula” from the last cleavage stage is certainly a process of organisation, and may also be called a differentiation with regard to that stage. But there is in the blastula no trace of one part of the germ becoming different with respect to others of its parts. If development were to go on in this direction alone, high organisatory complications might occur: but there would always be only one sort of cells, arranged in a sphere; there would be only one kind of what is called “tissue.”

But in fact development very soon loads to true differences of the parts of the germ with respect to one another, and the next step of the process will enable us to apply different denominations to the different parts of the embryo.

At one pole of the swimming blastula, exactly at the point where the descendants of the micromeres are situated, about fifty cells lose contact with their neighbours and leave the surface of the globe, being driven into the interior space of it. Not very much is known about the exact manner in which these changes of cellular arrangement are carried out, whether the cells are passively pressed by their neighbours, or whether, perhaps, in a more active manner, they change their surface conditions; therefore, as in most ontogenetic processes, the description had best be made cautiously in fairly neutral or figurative words.

The cells which in the above manner have entered the interior of the blastula are to be the foundation of important parts of the future organism; they are to form its connective tissue, many of its muscles, and the skeleton. “Mesenchyme,” i.e. “what has been infused into the other parts,” is the technical name usually applied to these cells. We now have to learn their definite arrangement. At first they lie as a sort of heap inside the cell wall of the blastula, inside the “blastoderm,” i.e. skin of the germ. But soon they move from one another, to form a ring round the pole at which they entered, and on this ring a process takes place which has a very important bearing upon the whole type of the organisation of the germ. You will have noticed that hitherto the germ with regard to its symmetry has been a monaxial or radial formation; the cleavage stages and the blastula with its mesenchyme were forms with two different poles, lying at the ends of one single line, and round this line everything was arranged concentrically. But now what is called “bilateral symmetry” is established; the mesenchyme ring assumes a structure which can be symmetrically divided only by one plane, but divided in such a way, that one-half of it is the mirror image of the other. A figure shows best what has occurred, and you will notice (Fig. 3) two masses of cells in this figure, which have the forms of spherical triangles: it is in the midst of these triangles that the skeleton of the larva originates. The germ had an upper and a lower side before: it now has got an upper and lower, front and back, right and left half; it now has acquired that symmetry of organisation which our own body has; at least it has got it as far as its mesenchyme is concerned.

Fig. 3.—Formation of Mesenchyme in Echinus.

a. Outlines of blastula, side-view; mesenchyme forms a heap of cells at the “vegetative” pole.
a1.Heap of mesenchyme-cells from above.
b. Mesenchyme-cells arranged in a ring round the vegetative pole.
c. Mesenchyme-cells arranged in a bilateral-symmetrical figure; primordia of skeleton in the midst of two spherical triangles.