The objection suggested by these questions is a very valid and important one, and morphology was in an unsound state, so long as it rested upon the mere perception of the analogies which obtain between fully formed parts.  The unchecked ingenuity of speculative anatomists proved itself fully competent to spin any number of contradictory hypotheses out of the same facts, and endless morphological dreams threatened to supplant scientific theory.

Happily, however, there is a criterion of morphological truth, and a sure test of all homologies.  Our lobster has not always been what we see it; it was once an egg, a semifluid mass of yolk, not so big as a pin’s head, contained in a transparent membrane, and exhibiting not the least trace of any one of those organs, whose multiplicity and complexity, in the adult, are so surprising.  After a time a delicate patch of cellular membrane appeared upon one face of this yolk, and that patch was the foundation of the whole creature, the clay out of which it would be moulded.  Gradually investing the yolk, it became subdivided by transverse constrictions into segments, the forerunners of the rings of the body.  Upon the ventral surface of each of the rings thus sketched out, a pair of bud-like prominences made their appearance—­the rudiments of the appendages of the ring.  At first, all the appendages were alike, but, as they grew, most of them became distinguished into a stem and two terminal divisions, to which, in the middle part of the body, was added a third outer division; and it was only at a later period, that by the modification, or abortion, of certain of these primitive constituents, the limbs acquired their perfect form.

Thus the study of development proves that the doctrine of unity of plan is not merely a fancy, that it is not merely one way of looking at the matter, but that it is the expression of deep-seated natural facts.  The legs and jaws of the lobster may not merely be regarded as modifications of a common type,—­in fact and in nature they are so,—­the leg and the jaw of the young animal being, at first, indistinguishable.

These are wonderful truths, the more so because the zoologist finds them to be of universal application.  The investigation of a polype, of a snail, of a fish, of a horse, or of a man, would have led us, though by a less easy path, perhaps, to exactly the same point.  Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure—­the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.  Every animal has at first the form of an egg, and every animal and every organic part, in reaching its adult state, passes through conditions common to other animals and other adult parts; and this leads me to another point.  I have hitherto spoken as if the lobster were alone in the world, but, as I need hardly remind you, there are myriads of other animal organisms.  Of these, some, such as men, horses, birds, fishes, snails, slugs, oysters, corals, and sponges, are not