The Catholic World, Vol. 15, Nos. 85-90, April 1872-September 1872 / A Monthly Magazine

, nor by a sudden formation or an instantaneous transition from potential to actual existence. It is effected by the true production of a new being,

terialists who maintained that there was but one type in the whole animal kingdom, that is, man, as he unites in himself in the highest possible degree perfection of organism and delicacy of feelings; and that all the species

re perfect structure proceed further than those whose organization is completed at less cost. It results from this that the transitory or embryonic state of a superior animal resembles, in a more or less wonderful manner, the permanent state of another animal lower in the same zoological series. Some authors have thought right to conclude from this that the diversity of species proceeds from a series of stages of this kind taking place at different degrees of the embryonic development; and these writers, falling into the exaggerations to which imitators are especially liable, have held that every superior animal, in order to

less perfect, of the same; an inchoation stopped in its course at a greater or shorter distance from the term to which the w

pecies of animals inferior to man are but so many lower steps at which the human embryo stops in its gradual development. Man, on the contrary, is the last term reached by nature after she has travelled all through the zoological scale, to fit herself for that work. About the same time the celebrated naturalist, Stephen Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, began to disseminate

comes the term of their development. The long series of changes of form presented by the same organism in comparative anatomy is but the reproduction of the numerous series of transformations to which this organism is subjected in the embryo in the course of its development. In the embryo the passage is rapid, in virtue of the power of the life which animates it; in the animal the life of the organism is exhausted, and it stops there, because it is not permitted to fol

erres. And in

sms. It stops here sooner, there later, and thus at the time of each interruption determines, by the stat