Biology and Its Makers / With Portraits and Other Illustrations

by William A. Locy

Now, these elementary layers are not definitive tissues of the body, but are embryonic, and therefore may appropriately be designated "germ-layers." The conception that these germ-layers are essentially similar in origin and fate in all animals was a fuller and later development of the germ-layer theory, a conception which dominated embryological study until a recent date.

Von Baer recognized four such layers; the outer and inner ones being formed first, and subsequently budding off a middle layer composed of two sheets. A little later (1845) Remak recognized the double middle layer of Von Baer as a unit, and thus arrived at the fundamental conception of three layers—the ecto-, endo-, and mesoderm—which has so long held sway. For a long time after Von Baer the aim of embryologists was to trace the history of these germ-layers, and so in a wider and much qualified sense it is to-day.

It will ever stand to his credit, as a great achievement, that Von Baer was able to make a very complicated feature of development clear and relatively simple. Given a leaf-like rudiment, with the layers held out by the yolk, as is the case in the hen's egg, it was no easy matter to conceive how they are transformed into the nervous system, the body-wall, the alimentary canal, and other parts, but Von Baer saw deeply and clearly that the fundamental anatomical features of the body are assumed by the leaf-like rudiments being rolled into tubes.

Fig. 67 shows four sketches taken from the plates illustrating von Baer's work. At A is shown a stage in the formation of the embryonic envelope, or amnion, which surrounds the embryos of all animals above the class of amphibia. B, another figure of an ideal section, shows that, long before the day of microtomes, Von Baer made use of sections to represent the relationships of his four germ-layers. At C and D is represented diagrammatically the way in which these layers are rolled into tubes. He showed that the central nervous system arose in the form of a tube, from the outer layer; the body-wall in the form of a tube, composed of skin and muscle layers; and the alimentary tube from mucous and vascular layers.

The generalization that embryos in development tend to recapitulate their ancestral history is frequently attributed to Von Baer, but the qualified way in which he suggests something of the sort will not justify one in attaching this conclusion to his work.

Von Baer was the first to make embryology truly comparative, and to point out its great value in anatomy and zoölogy. By embryological studies he recognized four types of organization—as Cuvier had done from the standpoint of comparative anatomy. But, since these types of organization have been greatly changed and subdivided, the importance of the distinction has faded away. As a distinct break, however, with the old idea of a linear scale of being it was of moment.

Among his especially noteworthy discoveries may be mentioned that of the egg of mammals (1827), and the notochord as occurring in all vertebrate animals. His discovery of the mammalian egg had been preceded by Purkinje's observations upon the germinative spot in the bird's egg (1825).

Von Baer's Rank.—Von Baer has come to be dignified with the title of the "father of modern embryology." No man could have done more in his period, and it is owing to his superb intellect, and to his talents as an observer, that he accomplished what he did. As Minot says: "He worked out, almost as fully as was possible at this time, the genesis of all the principal organs from the germ-layers, instinctively getting at the truth as only a great genius could have done."