These statements appear to be true; but the work described by Haeckel, cannot be done by man nor woman; nor by their sexual organs; nor by the blind unthinking atoms which go to build up the spermatozoön and the ovum. The Creator only, can make them!
“The phenomena we have described,” he says, on another page, “can only be understood and explained by ascribing a certain lower degree of psychic activity to the sexual principles. They feel each other’s proximity and are drawn together by a sensitive impulse (probably related to smell); they move towards each other and do not rest until they fuse together.” (Haeckel, Evolution of Man, p. 58.)
There is no pretense that the spermatozoön has any brain, eyes, ears, nose, taste or touch; nor that the ovum has any such organs. Then, how can they have any “degree of psychic activity;” how can “they feel each other’s proximity;” how can “they move towards each other?” How could either know in what direction to go in order to reach the other?
It is absurd to suppose that the spermatozoön and ovum have any knowledge of each other, or of anything else; and the only reasonable hypothesis is that the Creator generates, guides, and controls the forces which bring them together and fuse them into the germ-cell.
Sec. 14. Ovum
The word ovum is defined as: “An egg in a broad biological sense; and the proper product of an ovary; the female germ or seed, which, when fertilized by the male sperm, is capable of developing into an individual like the parents.… An ovum consists of a quantity of protoplasm or cell-substance called the vitellus or yolk inclosed in a cell-wall or vitelline membrane, and provided with a nucleus and nucleolus.” (Cent. Dic. 5, p. 4212.)
“The ovum (egg) is extremely small,” says Haeckel, “being a tiny round vesicle about 1/120th of an inch in diameter; it can be seen under favorable circumstances with the naked eye as a tiny particle, but is otherwise quite invisible. This particle is formed in the ovary inside a much larger globule, which takes the name of the Graäfian follicle, from its discoverer, Graäf, and [which] had been previously regarded as the true ovum.” (Evolution of Man, chap. 3, pp. 16-17.)
“Man is developed,” says Darwin, “from an ovule (little egg) about the 1/125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.” (Descent of Man, chap. 1, p. 9.)
“In man,” says Romanes, “as in most mammals, it (the ovum or egg-cell) is about 1/120th of an inch in diameter.” (Romanes, Darwin and After Darwin, 1, p. 120.)