Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/210

198 extending over the whole surface—the blastoderm. The next stage of development, which ends in this covering layer becoming double, is reached in two ways—by invagination and by delamination; but which is the original way, and which the abridged way, is not quite certain. Of invagination, multitudinously exemplified in the lowest types, Mr. Balfour says:—"On purely à priori grounds there is in my opinion more to be said for invagination than for any other view"; and, for present purposes, it will suffice if we limit ourselves to this: making its nature clear to the general reader by a simple illustration.

Take a small india-rubber ball—not of the inflated kind, nor of the solid kind, but of the kind about an inch or so in diameter with a small hole through which, under pressure, the air escapes. Suppose that instead of consisting of india-rubber its wall consists of small cells made polyhedral in form by mutual pressure, and united together. This will represent the blastoderm. Now with the finger, thrust in one side of the ball until it touches the other: so making a cup. This action will stand for the process of invagination. Imagine that by continuance of it, the hemispherical cup becomes very much deepened and the opening narrowed, until the cup becomes a sac, of which the introverted wall is everywhere in contact with the outer wall. This will represent the two-layered "gastrula"—the simplest ancestral form of the Metazoa: a form which is permanently represented in some of the lowest types; for it needs but tentacles round the mouth of the sac, to produce a common hydra. Here the fact which it chiefly concerns us to remark, is that of these two layers the outer, called in embryological language the epiblast, continues to carry on direct converse with the forces and matters in the environment; while the inner, called the hypoblast, comes in contact with such only of these matters as are put into the food-cavity which it lines. We have further to note that in the embryos of Metazoa at all advanced in organization, there arises between these two layers a third—the mesoblast. The origin of this is seen in types where the developmental process is not obscured by the presence of a large food-yolk. While the above-described introversion is taking place, and before the inner surfaces of the resulting epiblast and hypoblast have come into contact, cells, or amœboid units equivalent to them, are budded off from one or both of these inner surfaces, or some part of one or other; and these form a layer which eventually lies between the other two—a layer which, as this mode of formation implies, never has any converse with the surrounding medium and its contents, or with the nutritive bodies taken in from it. The striking facts to which this description is a necessary introduction, may now be stated. From the outer layer, or epiblast, are developed the permanent skin and its out-growths, the nervous system, and the organs of sense; from the