It is obvious that the materials of which the embryo body is built up, except the fertilized ovum, are derived from the food eaten by the mother; that her heart and arteries generate the forces and produce the motions which carry the materials to the building site of the embryo, just as the builder assembles the bricks, stones, sand, lime, lumber, nails and other materials to build a house.
The embryo body is a compound physical structure built of cells, as a house is built of bricks. The atoms and cells, of which it is composed, are subject to all the laws of force and motion, to the same extent, and in the same manner that bricks are. Nor have they any more intellect, memory nor will-power than a brick has.
Perhaps the first thing that an infant does, after birth, is to breathe. In order to do this, air must be forced into, and out of its lungs. To enable the heart to beat, its auricles must dilate and take the blood into it; and its ventricles must contract and force the blood out of it, and into the arteries. So that every time one breathes, and every time one’s heart beats, force is exerted and motion of air and blood is produced. Every time one takes a drink of water or a bite of bread he must exert sufficient force to raise it, and produce sufficient motion to bring it to his mouth. Every time one takes a step he exerts sufficient force and produces sufficient motion to move his body the distance that he steps. For example, suppose that A, weighing two hundred pounds, gets on an electric street car and rides a mile. It is obvious that the electric motor has exerted sufficient force and produced sufficient motion of A’s body to move two hundred pounds, the distance of a mile. Now, if A had walked along the same railway track the same distance, it is clear that he would have exerted the same force and produced the same motion of his body that the motor did.
We eat, drink, speak, move, act, work, live—do everything by force and motion. When they cease, death comes.
Everything that a man can do with a physical body is resolvable into force and motion. He may move a body from one place to another; he may group two or more bodies together; or he may take two or more bodies apart; or he may cut or break a body into two or more parts. But, at last, all of these operations are equivalent to moving one or more bodies from one place to another, by force and motion.
A sewing machine, adding machine, watch, steam engine, and every other machine is constructed by force and motion. Every piece of music is sung or played by force and motion. Every painting is made by grouping two or more pigments (colors) together in a particular manner by force and motion.
Intellect, memory and will-power are necessary to produce two or more forces and motions in a prescribed order and within a given time. For example, each note in a piece of music requires, for its production, a certain force and peculiar motion (vibration) of cord, pipe or string within a certain time. It is obvious that intellect, memory and will-power are necessary to sing or play any piece of music. Before anyone can speak any given word he must have intellect, memory and will-power: (1) he must know the word to be uttered, (2) he must remember it until it is uttered, (3) he must have the will-power necessary to exert the force and produce the motion of air necessary to utter it. Let the reader speak the words: “earth,” “air,” “fire,” “water,” and analyze the process.
Intellect, memory and will-power are necessary to generate, guide, and control the forces and motions required to make a watch or any other compound machine or structure, within a given time. Suppose that a watchmaker is required to make each spring, wheel and part of a watch by hand, to put every part in its place and start it to running on or about the 280th day after he begins the work. (Haeckel Ev. Man, p. 199.) To do this work he must have intellect, memory and will-power to generate, guide, and control and time the forces and motions which are necessary to make each part of the watch and to fit and group them together when completed. He must know and remember every part of it; remember the material of which it is made; remember its form and size; compare each piece with the pattern; remember the time in which he is to do the work. He must have the will-power to begin and continue the work until it is done, doing such part of it each day as to complete it on or about the day fixed.
But the forces and motions, which build up the body of the embryo, work in the dark without brain or sense-organs. To put the watchmaker on the same basis with the Creator, we will have to suppose that the watchmaker is blind and has no sense of touch. Would it be possible for him to make a watch under these conditions?
The mother’s food is taken into her mouth, chewed and mixed with saliva and passes into her stomach. Here it is mixed with gastric juice and converted into chyme. It then passes into the small intestine (duodenum) where it is mixed with pancreatic secretion, bile and “the secretion of the glands Brunner and the Crypts of Lieberkühn” and thus converted into chyle. Most of the “nutritive constituents” of the chyle pass through the epithelium of the small intestines into the subjacent blood and lymphatic vessels and are carried off. Those passing into the blood capillaries are taken by the portal vein to the liver; while those entering the lacteals are carried into the left jugular vein by the thoracic duct. (Martin, Human Body, pp. 361-377.)