The record-union., 1897-01-15
MAN A CHANCE CHILD.
New Theory of the Origin of Verte-
brates-Nature'S Mistake.

The greatest body Of learned men in
the English-speaking world, the British
Association for the Advancement Of
Science, recently listened to startling
theory propounded by one Of it's most
learned members, DR.. w. II. Gaskell the
President of the Section of Physiology.
Darwin and his followers long ago
familiarized readers of scientific books
with the idea that man is descended
from the monkey or from some animal
resembling the monkey. But other
men of science have gone further back
than that and endeavored to ascertain
who, or what, were the more remote
ancestors of man, far anterior to the
time when apes and monkeys first ap-
peared upon the earth
Man belongs to that branch Of the
animal kingdom which consists of YER
tebrates, or animals having backbones.
He is the highest form of vertebrate and
In him the brain and the nervous system
have reached their most perfect devel-
opment. All the other back -boned ami
mails also have brains and nervous sys-
TENS. only inferior in development to
mans. Now the question the savants
L.
kell thinks he has practically solved, is:
What animals were the ancestors Of the
whole great vertebrate family?
Well, the monkey is a very respectable
great great grandfather for us COM
pared with some of the creatures that
DR.. Gaskell places In our line of descent.
What is to be thought Of the king crab
as an ancestor of man? The king crab
is kind Of marine cousin to scorpions
and spiders, which are also ranked
among our progenitors
DR.. Gaskell asserts that the particular
forms of animals from which our family
has hitherto been supposed to have
sprung are degenerate forms, whereas
in truth there are no degenerates in our
line The march has always been up
ward, and the king crab and the scor-
pion give us pure line of descent, and
make us the real blue blood aristocrats
of the earth.
Another interesting branch of our an
cestral tree, still earlier than the king
crab, comprises an animal even less ac-
ceptable to fastidious tastes, namely,
the lamprey eel In this Shiny inhabi-
tant OF the water DR.. Gaskell says the
corresponding parts can be traced for
all the different organs and parts Of the
higher vertebrate animals
Our nervous system is tubular in it's
character, and 1t got this form, accord
ing to DIR. Gaskell, because what is now
the central tube Of the backbone was
originally the alimentary canal of an
animal resembling the king crab. and
the human brain is hollow because it
has grown up around what was once
the stomach of such an animal.
The doctor went on, in his address to
his learned hearers in London, to show
how the various nerves of the brain
are derived from certain nerves of the
early king crab, and how "our cerebral
hemispheres (the two halves of the
brain) are but notifications of the su-
pra-oesophageal gauglia of a scorpion,
while our eyes and nose are the direct
descendants Of it's eyes and olfactory
organs"
And all this wonderful sequence of
descent and development, we are told,
was the result of a curious blunder
which nature made. But she corrected
the mistake and then. not content with