Abstract
MR. H. G. WELLS, in a recent number of NATURE, honours my little book by making it an example of a contravention of what he regards as a principle of education. With that I have no quarrel. But I must object to the instance he has chosen. The sentences from which he quotes refer to the phenomena of segmentation common to cœlomate tissues, and not to the derivation of vertebrates from any invertebrate group. So far from giving “the impression almost in so many words—‘cut and dried, and ready to be cast into the oven—that the vertebrate type is merely a concentrated derivative (concertina fashion) of the chætopod type,” I devote the chapter (xv.) from which he has taken his quotations, to showing that the earthworm and the vertebrates merely belong to two out of the many isolated groups; and at the end of the chapter (though not in spaced type, as I did not consider the question of vertebrate descent congruous with the aims of an elementary text-book) I state that “the type common to the lowest members of the groups of which the earthworm on the one hand, and the vertebrates on the other, form the highest examples, is a simple unsegmented cœlomate animal.”
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MITCHELL, P. Vertebrate Segmentation. Nature 51, 367 (1895). https://doi.org/10.1038/051367a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/051367a0
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