The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 Part 11

We mean that those animals would be fittest to live, and multiply most, which developed this organisation. Sense-organs would now appear in the head, in the form of simple depressions, lined with sensitive cells, as they do in the embryo; and a clump of nerve-cells within would represent the primitive brain. In the vast and varied worm-group we find ill.u.s.trations of nearly every step in this process of evolution.

The highest type of worm-like creature, the acorn-headed worm--_Balanoglossus_--takes us an important step further. It has gill-openings for breathing, and a cord of cartilage down its back. We saw that the human embryo has a gill-apparatus, and that, comparing the lancelet and the sea-squirt, the backbone must have begun as a string of cartilage-cells. We are now on firmer ground, for there is no doubt that all the higher land-animals come from a fish ancestor. The shark, one of the most primitive of fishes in organisation, probably best suggests this ancestor to us. In fact, in the embryonic development of the human face there is a clear suggestion of the shark.

Up to this period the story of evolution had run its course in the sea.

The area of dry land was now increasing, and certain of the primitive fishes adapted themselves to living on land. They walked on their fins, and used their floating-bladders--large air-bladders in the fish, for rising in the water--to breathe air. We not only have fishes of this type in Australia to-day, but we have the fossil remains of similar fishes in the Old Red Sandstone rocks. From mud-fish the amphibian would naturally develop, as it did in the coal-forest period. Walking on the fins would strengthen the main stem, the broad paddle would become useless, and we should get in time the bony five-toed limb. We have many of these giant salamander forms in the rocks.

The reptile now evolved from the amphibian, and a vast reptile population spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the _Archaeopteryx_, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. We find what seem to be the transitional types in the rocks of South Africa. The scales gave way to tufts of hair, the heart evolved a fourth chamber, and thus supplied purer blood (warm blood), the brain profited by the richer food, and the mother began to suckle the young. We have still a primitive mammal of this type in the duck-mole, or duck-billed platypus (_Ornithorhyncus_) of Australia. There are grounds for thinking that the next stage was an opossum-like animal, and this led on to the lowest ape-like being, the lemur. Judging from the fossil remains, the black lemur of Madagascar best suggests this ancestor.

The apes of the Old and New Worlds now diverged from this level, and some branch of the former gave rise to the man-like apes and man. In bodily structure and embryonic development the large apes come very close to man, and two recent discoveries have put their blood-relationship beyond question. One is that experiments in the transfusion of blood show that the blood of the man-like ape and man have the same action on the blood of lower animals. The other is that we have discovered, in Java, several bones of a being which stands just midway between the highest living ape and lowest living race of men.

This ape-man (_Pithecanthropus_) represents the last of our animal and first of our human ancestors.

_IV.--Evolution of Separate Organs_

So far, we have seen how the human body as a whole develops through a long series of extinct ancestors. We may now take the various systems of organs one by one, and, if we are careful to consult embryology as well as zoology, we can trace the manner of their development. It is, in accordance with our biogenetic law, the same in the embryo, as a rule, as in the story of past evolution.

We take first the nervous system. In the lowest animals, as in the early stages of the embryo, there are no nerve-cells. In the embryo the nerve-cells develop from the outer, or skin layer, of cells. This, though strange as regards the human nervous system, is a correct preservation of the primitive seat of the nerves. It was the surface of the animal that needed to be sensitive in the primitive organism. Later, when definite connecting nerves were formed, only special points in the surface, protected by coverings which did not interfere with the sensitiveness, needed to be exposed, and the nerves transmitted the impressions to the central brain.

This development is found in the animal world to-day. In such animals as the hydra we find the first crude beginning of unorganised nerve-cells.

In the jelly-fish we find nerve-cells cl.u.s.tered into definite sensitive organs. In the lower worms we have the beginning of organs of smell and vision. They are at first merely blind, sensitive pits in the skin, as in the embryo. The ear has a peculiar origin. Up to the fish level there is no power of hearing. There is merely a little stone rolling in a sensitive bed, to warn the animal of its movement from side to side. In the higher animals this evolves into the ear.

The glands of the skin (sweat, fat, tears, etc.) appear at first as blunt, simple ingrowths. The hair first appears in tufts, representing the scales, from underneath which they were probably evolved. The thin coat of hair on the human body to-day is an ancestral inheritance. This is well shown by the direction of the hairs on the arm. As on the ape's arm, both on the upper and lower arm, they grow toward the elbow. The ape finds this useful in rain, using his arms like a thatched roof, and on our arm this can only be a reminiscence of the habits of an ape ancestor.

We have seen how the spinal cord first appears as a tube in the axis of the back, and the cartilaginous column closes round it. All bone appears first as membrane, then cartilage, and finally ossifies. This is the order both in past evolution and in present embryonic development. The brain is at first a bulbous expansion of the spinal nerve-cord. It is at first simple, but gradually, both in the scale of nature and in the embryo, divides into five parts. One of these parts, the cerebrum, is mainly connected with mental life. We find it increasing in size, in proportion to the animal's intelligence, until in man it comes to cover the whole of the brain. When we remove it from the head of the mammal, without killing the animal, we find all mental life suspended, and the whole vitality used in vegetative functions.

In the evolution of the bony system we find the same correspondence of embryology and evolution. The main column is at first a rod of cartilage. In time the separate cubes appear which are to form the vertebrae of the flexible column. The skull develops in the same way.

Just as the brain is a specially modified part of the nerve-rod, the skull is only a modified part of the vertebral column. The bones that compose it are modified vertebrae, as Goethe long ago suspected. The skull of the shark gives us a hint of the way in which the modification took place, and the formation of the skull in the embryo confirms it.

That adult man is devoid of that prolongation of the vertebral column which we call a tail is not a distinctive peculiarity. The higher apes are equally without it. We find, however, that the human embryo has a long tail, much longer than the legs, when they are developing. At times, moreover, children are born with tails--perfect tails, with nerves and muscles, which they move briskly under emotion, and these have to be amputated. The development of the limb from the fin offers no serious difficulty to the osteologist. All the higher animals descend from a five-toed ancestor. The whale has taken again to the water, and reconverted its limb into a paddle. The bones of the front feet still remain under the flesh. Animals of the horse type have had the central toe strengthened, for running purposes, at the expense of the rest. The serpent has lost its limbs from disuse, but in the python a rudimentary limb-bone is still preserved.

The alimentary system, blood-vessel system, and reproductive system have been evolved gradually in the same way. The stomach is at first the whole cavity in the animal. Later it becomes a straight, simple tube, strengthened by a gullet in front. The liver is an outgrowth from this tube; the stomach proper is a bulbous expansion of its central part, later provided with a valve. The kidneys are at first simple channels in the skin for drainage, then closed tubes, which branch out more and more, and then gather into our compact kidneys. We thus see that the building up of the human body from a single cell is a substantial epitome of the long story of evolution, which occupied many millions of years. We find man bearing in his body to-day traces of organs which were useful to a remote ancestor, but of no advantage, and often a source of mischief to himself. We learn that the origin of man, instead of being placed a few thousand years ago, must be traced back to the point where, hundreds of thousands of years ago, he diverged from his ape-cousins, though he retains to-day the plainest traces of that relationship. Body and mind--for the development of mind follows with the utmost precision on the development of brain--he is the culmination of a long process of development. His spirit is a form of energy inseparably bound up with the substance of his body. His evolution has been controlled by the same "eternal, iron laws" as the development of any other body--the laws of heredity and adaptation.

WILLIAM HARVEY

On the Motion of the Heart and Blood

William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was born at Folkestone, England, on April 1, 1578. After graduating from Caius College, Cambridge, he studied at Padua, where he had the celebrated anatomist, Fabricius of Aquapendente, for his master. In 1615 he was elected Lumleian lecturer at the College of Physicians, and three years later was appointed physician extraordinary to King James I. In 1628, twelve years after his first statement of it in his lectures, he published at Frankfurt, in Latin, "An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood," in which he maintained that there is a circulation of the blood. Moreover, he distinguished between the pulmonary circulation, from the right side of the heart to the left through the lungs, and the systemic circulation from the left side of the heart to the right through the rest of the body. Further, he maintained that it was the office of the heart to maintain this circulation by its alternate _diastole_ (expansion) and _systole_ (contraction) throughout life. This discovery was, says Sir John Simon, the most important ever made in physiological science. It is recorded that after his publication of it Harvey lost most of his practice. Harvey died on June 3, 1657.

_I.--Motions of the Heart in Living Animals_

When first I gave my mind to vivisections as a means of discovering the motions and uses of the heart, I found the task so truly arduous that I was almost tempted to think, with Fracastorius, that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by G.o.d. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place, nor when and where dilation and contraction occurred, by reason of the rapidity of the motion, which, in many animals, is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, coming and going like a flash of lightning. At length it appeared that these things happen together or at the same instant: the tension of the heart, the pulse of its apex, which is felt externally by its striking against the chest, the thickening of its walls, and the forcible expulsion of the blood it contains by the constriction of its ventricles.

Hence the very opposite of the opinions commonly received appears to be true; inasmuch as it is generally believed that when the heart strikes the breast and the pulse is felt without, the heart is dilated in its ventricles and is filled with blood. But the contrary of this is the fact; that is to say, the heart is in the act of contracting and being emptied. Whence the motion, which is generally regarded as the diastole of the heart, is in truth its systole. And in like manner the intrinsic motion of the heart is not the diastole but the systole; neither is it in the diastole that the heart grows firm and tense, but in the systole; for then alone when tense is it moved and made vigorous. When it acts and becomes tense the blood is expelled; when it relaxes and sinks together it receives the blood in the manner and wise which will by and by be explained.

From divers facts it is also manifest, in opposition to commonly received opinions, that the diastole of the arteries corresponds with the time of the heart's systole; and that the arteries are filled and distended by the blood forced into them by the contraction of the ventricles. It is in virtue of one and the same cause, therefore, that all the arteries of the body pulsate, _viz._, the contraction of the left ventricle in the same way as the pulmonary artery pulsates by the contraction of the right ventricle.

I am persuaded it will be found that the motion of the heart is as follows. First of all, the auricle contracts and throws the blood into the ventricle, which, being filled, the heart raises itself straightway, makes all its fibres tense, contracts the ventricles and performs a beat, by which beat it immediately sends the blood supplied to it by the auricle into the arteries; the right ventricle sending its charge into the lungs by the vessel called _vena arteriosa_, but which, in structure and function, and all things else, is an artery; the left ventricle sending its charge into the aorta, and through this by the arteries to the body at large.

The grand cause of hesitation and error in this subject appears to me to have been the intimate connection between the heart and the lungs. When men saw both the pulmonary artery and the pulmonary veins losing themselves in the lungs, of course it became a puzzle to them to know how the right ventricle should distribute the blood to the body, or the left draw it from the _venae cavae_. Or they have hesitated because they did not perceive the route by which the blood is transferred from the veins to the arteries, in consequence of the intimate connection between the heart and lungs. And that this difficulty puzzled anatomists not a little when in their dissections they found the pulmonary artery and left ventricle full of black and clotted blood, plainly appears when they felt themselves compelled to affirm that the blood made its way from the right to the left ventricle by sweating through the septum of the heart.

Had anatomists only been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals as they are with that of the human body, the matters that have hitherto kept them in perplexity of doubt would, in my opinion, have met them freed from every kind of difficulty. And first in fishes, in which the heart consists of but a single ventricle, they having no lungs, the thing is sufficiently manifest. Here the sac, which is situated at the base of the heart, and is the part a.n.a.logous to the auricle in man, plainly throws the blood into the heart, and the heart in its turn conspicuously transmits it by a pipe or artery, or vessel a.n.a.logous to an artery; these are facts which are confirmed by simple ocular experiment. I have seen, farther, that the same thing obtained most obviously.

And since we find that in the greater number of animals, in all indeed at a certain period of their existence, the channels for the transmission of the blood through the heart are so conspicuous, we have still to inquire wherefore in some creatures--those, namely, that have warm blood and that have attained to the adult age, man among the number--we should not conclude that the same thing is accomplished through the substance of the lungs, which, in the embryo, and at a time when the functions of these organs is in abeyance, Nature effects by direct pa.s.sages, and which indeed she seems compelled to adopt through want of a pa.s.sage by the lungs; or wherefore it should be better (for Nature always does that which is best) that she should close up the various open routes which she had formerly made use of in the embryo, and still uses in all other animals; not only opening up no new apparent channels for the pa.s.sage of the blood therefore, but even entirely shutting up those which formerly existed in the embryos of those animals that have lungs. For while the lungs are yet in a state of inaction, Nature uses the two ventricles of the heart as if they formed but one for the transmission of the blood. The condition of the embryos of those animals which have lungs is the same as that of those animals which have no lungs.

Thus, by studying the structure of the animals who are nearer to and further from ourselves in their modes of life and in the construction of their bodies, we can prepare ourselves to understand the nature of the pulmonary circulation in ourselves, and of the systemic circulation also.

_II.--Systemic Circulation_

What remains to be said is of so novel and unheard of a character that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies, so much do wont and custom that become as another nature, and doctrine once sown that hath struck deep root, and respect for antiquity, influence all men.

And, sooth to say, when I surveyed my ma.s.s of evidence, whether derived from vivisections and my previous reflections on them, or from the ventricles of the heart and the vessels that enter into and issue from them, the symmetry and size of these conduits--for Nature, doing nothing in vain, would never have given them so large a relative size without a purpose; or from the arrangement and intimate structure of the valves in particular and of the many other parts of the heart in general, with many things besides; and frequently and seriously bethought me and long revolved in my mind what might be the quant.i.ty of blood which was transmitted, in how short a time its pa.s.sage might be effected and the like; and not finding it possible that this could be supplied by the juices of the ingested aliment without the veins on the one hand becoming drained, and the arteries on the other getting ruptured through the excessive charge of blood, unless the blood should somehow find its way from the arteries into the veins, and so return to the right side of the heart; when I say, I surveyed all this evidence, I began to think whether there might not be _a motion as it were in a circle_.

Now this I afterwards found to be true; and I finally saw that the blood, forced by the action of the left ventricle into the arteries, was distributed to the body at large, and its several parts, in the same manner as it is sent through the lungs, impelled by the right ventricle into the pulmonary artery; and that it then pa.s.sed through the veins and along the _vena cava_, and so round to the left ventricle in the manner already indicated; which motion we may be allowed to call circular, in the same way as Aristotle says that the air and the rain emulate the circular motion of the superior bodies. For the moist earth, warmed by the sun, evaporates; the vapours drawn upwards are condensed, and descending in the form of rain moisten the earth again. And by this arrangement are generations of living things produced; and in like manner, too, are tempests and meteors engendered by the circular motion of the sun.

And so in all likelihood does it come to pa.s.s in the body through the motion of the blood. The various parts are nourished, cherished, quickened by the warmer, more perfect, vaporous, spirituous, and, as I may say, alimentive blood; which, on the contrary, in contact with these parts becomes cooled, coagulated, and, so to speak, effete; whence it returns to its sovereign, the heart, as if to its source, or to the inmost home of the body, there to recover its state of excellence or perfection. Here it resumes its due fluidity, and receives an infusion of natural heat--powerful, fervid, a kind of treasury of life--and is impregnated with spirits and, it might be said, with balsam; and thence it is again dispersed. And all this depends upon the motion and action of the heart.

_Confirmations of the Theory_

Three points present themselves for confirmation, which, being established, I conceive that the truth I contend for will follow necessarily and appear as a thing obvious to all.

The first point is this. The blood is incessantly transmitted by the action of the heart from the _vena cava_ to the arteries in such quant.i.ty that it cannot be supplied from the ingesta, and in such wise that the whole ma.s.s must very quickly pa.s.s through the organ.

Let us a.s.sume the quant.i.ty of blood which the left ventricle of the heart will contain when distended to be, say, two ounces (in the dead body I have found it to contain upwards of two ounces); and let us suppose, as approaching the truth, that the fourth part of its charge is thrown into the artery at each contraction. Now, in the course of half an hour the heart will have made more than one thousand beats.

Multiplying the number of drachms propelled by the number of pulses, we shall have one thousand half-ounces sent from this organ into the artery; a larger quant.i.ty than is contained in the whole body. This truth, indeed, presents itself obviously before us when we consider what happens in the dissection of living animals. The great artery need not be divided, but a very small branch only (as Galen even proves in regard to man), to have the whole of the blood in the body, as well that of the veins as of the arteries, drained away in the course of no long time--some half hour or less.

The second point is this. The blood, under the influence of the arterial pulse, enters, and is impelled in a continuous, equable, and incessant stream through every part and member of the body in much larger quant.i.ty than were sufficient for nutrition, or than the whole ma.s.s of fluids could supply.

I have here to cite certain experiments. Ligatures are either very tight or of middling tightness. A ligature I designate as tight, or perfect, when it is drawn so close about an extremity that no vessel can be felt pulsating beyond it. Such ligatures are employed in the removal of tumours; and in these cases, all afflux of nutriment and heat being prevented by the ligature, we see the tumours dwindle and die, and finally drop off. Now let anyone make an experiment upon the arm of a man, either using such a fillet as is employed in bloodletting, or grasping the limb tightly with his hand; let a ligature be thrown about the extremity and drawn as tightly as can be borne. It will first be perceived that beyond the ligature the arteries do not pulsate, while above it the artery begins to rise higher at each diastole and to swell with a kind of tide as it strove to break through and overcome the obstacle to its current.

Then let the ligature be brought to that state of middling tightness which is used in bleeding, and it will be seen that the hand and arm will instantly become deeply suffused and extended, and the veins show themselves tumid and knotted. Which is as much as to say that when the arteries pulsate the blood is flowing through them, but where they do not pulsate they cease from transmitting anything. The veins again being compressed, nothing can flow through them; the certain indication of which is that below the ligature they are much more tumid than above it.

Whence is this blood? It must needs arrive by the arteries. For that it cannot flow in by the veins appears from the fact that the blood cannot be forced towards the heart unless the ligature be removed. Further, when we see the veins below the ligature instantly swell up and become gorged when from extreme tightness it is somewhat relaxed, the arteries meanwhile continuing unaffected, this is an obvious indication that the blood pa.s.ses from the arteries into the veins, and not from the veins into the arteries, and that there is either an anastomosis of the two orders of vessels, or pores in the flesh and solid parts generally that are permeable to the blood.

And now we understand wherefore in phlebotomy we apply our fillet above the part that is punctured, not below it. Did the flow come from above, not from below, the bandage in this case would not only be of no service, but would prove a positive hindrance. And further, if we calculate how many ounces flow through one arm or how many pa.s.s in twenty or thirty pulsations under the medium ligature, we shall perceive that a circulation is absolutely necessary, seeing that the quant.i.ty cannot be supplied immediately from the ingesta, and is vastly more than can be requisite for the mere nutrition of the parts.

And the third point to be confirmed is this. That the veins return this blood to the heart incessantly from all parts and members of the body.

This position will be made sufficiently clear from the valves which are found in the cavities of the veins themselves, from the uses of these, and from experiments cognisable by the senses. The celebrated Hieronymus Fabricius, of Aquapendente, first gave representations of the valves in the veins, which consist of raised or loose portions of the inner membranes of these vessels of extreme delicacy and a sigmoid, or semi-lunar shape. Their office is by no means explained when we are told that it is to hinder the blood, by its weight, from flowing into inferior parts; for the edges of the valves in the jugular veins hang downwards, and are so contrived that they prevent the blood from rising upwards.

The valves, in a word, do not invariably look upwards, but always towards the trunks of the veins--towards the seat of the heart. They are solely made and inst.i.tuted lest, instead of advancing from the extreme to the central parts of the body, the blood should rather proceed along the veins from the centre to the extremities; but the delicate valves, while they readily open in the right direction, entirely prevent all such contrary motion, being so situated and arranged that if anything escapes, or is less perfectly obstructed by the flaps of the one above, the fluid pa.s.sing, as it were, by the c.h.i.n.ks between the flaps, it is immediately received on the convexity of the one beneath, which is placed transversely with reference to the former, and so is effectually hindered from getting any farther. And this I have frequently experienced in my dissections of veins. If I attempted to pa.s.s a probe from the trunk of the veins into one of the smaller branches, whatever care I took I found it impossible to introduce it far any way by reason of the valves; whilst, on the contrary, it was most easy to push it along in the opposite direction, from without inwards, or from the branches towards the trunks and roots.

And now I may be allowed to give in brief my view of the circulation of the blood, and to propose it for general adoption.