Page:EB1911 - Volume 16.djvu/245

 and redia produce ova which have the power of developing unfertilized; in this case the larva probably has not the power of continuing its development. It is very generally held by philosophers that the end of life is reproduction, and there is much to be said for this view; but, granting its truth, it is difficult to see why the capacity for reproduction should so generally be confined to the later stages of life. We know by more than one instance that it is possible for the larva to reproduce by sexual generation; why should not the phenomenon be more common? It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to answer this question.

The conclusion, then, that we reach is that the larval phase of life graduates into the later phases, and that it is impossible to characterize it with precision, as we can the embryonic phase. Nevertheless great importance has been attached, in certain cases, to the forms assumed by the young organism when it breaks loose from its embryonic bonds. It has been widely held that the study of larvae is of greater importance in determining genetic affinity than the study of adults. What justification is there for this view? The phase of life, chosen for the ordinary anatomical and physiological studies and labelled as the adult phase, is merely one of the large number of stages of structure through which the organism passes during its free life. In animals with a well-marked larval phase, by far the greater number of the stages of structure are included in the larval period, for the developmental changes are more numerous and take place with greater rapidity at the beginning of life than in its later periods. As each of the larval stages is equal in value for the purposes of our study to the adult phase, it clearly follows that, if there is anything in the view that the anatomical study of organisms is of importance in determining their mutual relations, the study of the organism in its various larval stages must have a greater importance than the study of the single and arbitrarily selected stage of life called the adult.

The importance, then, of the study of larval forms is admitted, but before proceeding to it this question may be asked: What is the meaning of the larval phase? Obviously this is part of a larger problem: Why does an organism, as soon as it is established at the fertilization of the ovum, enter upon a cycle of transformations which never cease until death puts an end to them? It is impossible to give any other answer to this question than this, viz. that it is a property of living matter to react in a remarkable way to external forces without undergoing destruction. As is explained in, development consists of an orderly interaction between the organism and its environment. The action of the environment produces certain morphological changes in the organism. These changes enable the organism to move into a new environment, which in its turn produces further structural changes in the organism. These in their turn enable, indeed necessitate, the organism to move again into a new environment, and so the process continues until the end of the life-cycle. The essential condition of success in this process is that the organism should always shift into the environment to which its new structure is suited, any failure in this leading to impairment of the organism. In most cases the shifting of the environment is a very gradual process, and the morphological changes in connexion with each step of it are but slight. In some cases, however, jumps are made, and whenever such jumps occur we get the morphological phenomenon termed metamorphosis. It would be foreign to our purpose to consider this question further here, but before leaving it we may suggest, if we cannot answer, one further question. Has the duration and complexity of the life-cycle expanded or contracted since organisms first appeared on the earth? According to the current view, the life-cycle is continually being shortened at one end by the abbreviation of embryonic development and by the absorption of larval stages into the embryonic period, and lengthened at the other by the evolutionary creation of new adult phases. What was the condition of the earliest organisms? Had they the property of reacting to external forces to the same extent and in the same orderly manner that organisms have to-day?

For the purpose of obtaining light upon the genetic affinities of an organism, a larval stage has as much importance as has the adult stage. According to the current views of naturalists, which are largely a product of Darwinism, it has its counterpart, as has the adult stage, in the ancestral form from which the living organism has been derived by descent with modification. Just as the adult phase of the living form differs owing to evolutionary modification from the adult phase of the ancestor, so each larval phase will differ for the same reason from the corresponding larval phase in the ancestral life-history. Inasmuch as the organism is variable at every stage of its existence, and is exposed to the action of natural selection, there is no reason why it should escape modification at any stage. But, as the characters of the ancestor are unknown, it is impossible to ascertain what the modification has been, and the determination of which of the characters of its descendant (whether larval or adult) are new and which ancient must be conjectural. It has been customary of late years to distinguish in larvae those characters which are supposed to have been recently acquired as caenogenetic, the ancient characters being termed palingenetic. These terms, if they have any value, are applicable with equal force to adults, but they are cumbrous, and the absence of any satisfactory test which enables us to distinguish between a character which is ancestral and one which has been recently acquired renders their utility very doubtful. Just as the adult may be supposed, on evolution doctrine, to be derived from an ancestral adult, so the various larval stages may be supposed to have been derived from the corresponding larval stage of the hypothetical ancestor. If we admit organic evolution at all, we may perhaps go so far, but we are not in a position to go further, and to assert that each larval stage is representative of and, so to speak, derived from some adult stage in the remote past, when the organism progressed no further in its life-cycle than the stage of structure revealed by such a larval form. We may perhaps have a right to take up this position, but it is of no advantage to us to do so, because it leads us into the realm of pure fancy. Moreover, it assumes that an answer can be given to the question asked above—has the life-cycle of organisms contracted or expanded as the result of evolution? This question has not been satisfactorily answered. Indeed we may go further and say that naturalists have answered it in different ways according to the class of facts they were contemplating at the moment. If we are to consider larvae at all from the evolution point of view, we must treat them as being representative of ancestral larvae from which they have been derived by descent with modification; and we must leave open the question whether and to what extent the first organisms themselves passed through a complicated life-cycle.

From the above considerations it is not surprising to find that the larvae of different members of any group resemble each other to the same kind of degree as do the adults, and that the larvae of allied groups resemble one another more closely than do the larvae of remote groups, and finally that a study of larvae does in some cases reveal affinities which would not have been evident from a study of adults alone. Though it is impossible to give here an account of the larval forms of the animal kingdom, we may illustrate these points, which are facts of fundamental importance in the study of larvae, by a reference to specific cases.

The two great groups, Annelida and Mollusca, which by their adult structure present considerable affinity with one another, agree in possessing a very similar larval form, known as the trochosphere or trochophore.

A typical trochosphere larva (figs. 1, 2) possesses a small, transparent body divided into a large preoral lobe and a small postoral region. The mouth (4) is on the ventral surface at the junction of the preoral lobe with the hinder part of the body, and there is an anus (7) at the hind end. Connecting the two is a curved alimentary canal which is frequently divided into oesophagus, stomach and intestine. There is a preoral circlet of powerful cilia, called the “velum” (2), which encircles the body just anterior to the mouth and marks off the preoral lobe, and there is very generally a second ring of cilia immediately behind the mouth (3). At the anterior end of the preoral lobe is a nervous thickening of the ectoderm called