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A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga834
of the head and trunk in these animals. The extremities, however, are still
absent in these embryos. But even if they had existed in the earliest stage
of their development, we should learn nothing, for the feet of lizards and
mammals, the wings and feet of birds, no less than the hands and feet of
man, all arise from the same fundamental form.”
As has been said by Prof. Clodd, “the embryos of all living creatures
epitomize during development the series of changes through which the
ancestral forms passed if their ascent from the simple to the complex; the
higher structures passing through the same stages as the lower structures
up to the point when they are marked off from them, yet never becoming
in detail the form which they represent for the time being. For example, the
embryo of man has at the outset gill-like slits on each side of the neck, like a
fish. These give place to a membrane like that which supersedes gills in the
development of birds and reptiles; the heart is at first a simple pulsating
chamber like that in worms; the backbone is prolonged into a movable tail;
the great toe is extended, or opposable, like our thumbs, and like the toes
of apes; the body three months before birth is covered all over with hair
except on the palms and soles. At birth the head is relatively larger, and the
arms and legs relatively longer than in the adult; the nose is bridgeless; both
features, with others which need not be detailed, being distinctly ape-like.
Thus does the egg from which man springs, a structure only one hundred
and twenty-fifth of an inch in size, compress into a few weeks the results
of millions of years, and set before us the history of his development from
fish-like and reptilian forms, and of his more immediate descent from a hairy,
tailed quadruped. That which is individual or peculiar to him, the physical
and mental character inherited, is left to the slower development which
follows birth.”
This, then, in brief is the Western theory of Evolution—the Physical Ascent
of Man. We have given it as fully as might be in the small space at our disposal
in these lessons on the Yogi Philosophy. Why? Because we wish to prove to
the Western mind, in the Western way, that Western Science corroborates