Dr. Jaworski thinks that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot as yet imagine. I do not know whether he will succeed in maintaining this stupendous theory. If he does, he will really have made us, as he promises to do, “take a step towards the essence of things.” Meanwhile, thanks to his preparatory studies, he will always have made us take another and a very useful step towards a truth which this time is incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.
4
Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself all those which have preceded it; and man, the last-comer, contains within himself the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could distribute his body, if we could segregate each of his organs and keep it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne, from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement, which is man.
We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the occultists of the east, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature is incapable of verification.
5
So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally, is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory organs and so on.
I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously and meticulously established proofs.
I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski’s exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity and, in the three volumes published so far, it leads us to conclusions which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles, the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them within us; our organs are no other than themselves; we nourish all their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us, to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson’s old man used to speak to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the dark passage:
“Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!”
If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were coming out of Noah’s ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our houses.