The Evolution of Man — Volume 2 by Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August, 1834-1919

CHAPTER 2.27. THE EVOLUTION OF THE ALIMENTARY SYSTEM.

The chief of the vegetal organs of the human frame, to the evolution of which we now turn our attention, is the alimentary canal. The gut is the oldest of all the organs of the metazoic body, and it leads us back to the earliest age of the formation of organs--to the first section of the Laurentian period. As we have already seen, the result of the first division of labour among the homogeneous cells of the earliest multicellular animal body was the formation of an alimentary cavity. The first duty and first need of every organism is self-preservation. This is met by the functions of the nutrition and the covering of the body. When, therefore, in the primitive globular Blastaea the homogeneous cells began to effect a division of labour, they had first to meet this twofold need. One half were converted into alimentary cells and enclosed a digestive cavity, the gut. The other half became covering cells, and formed an envelope round the alimentary tube and the whole body. Thus arose the primary germinal layers--the inner, alimentary, or vegetal layer, and the outer, covering, or animal layer. (Cf. Chapter 2.19.)

When we try to construct an animal frame of the simplest conceivable type, that has some such primitive alimentary canal and the two primary layers constituting its wall, we inevitably come to the very remarkable embryonic form of the gastrula, which we have found with extraordinary persistence throughout the whole range of animals, with the exception of the unicellulars--in the Sponges, Cnidaria, Platodes, Vermalia, Molluscs, Articulates, Echinoderms, Tunicates, and Vertebrates. In all these stems the gastrula recurs in the same very simple form. It is certainly a remarkable fact that the gastrula is found in various animals as a larva-stage in their individual development, and that this gastrula, though much disguised by cenogenetic modifications, has everywhere essentially the same palingenetic structure (Figures 1.30 to 1.35). The elaborate alimentary canal of the higher animals develops ontogenetically from the same simple primitive gut of the gastrula.

This gastraea theory is now accepted by nearly all zoologists. It was first supported and partly modified by Professor Ray-Lankester; he proposed three years afterwards (in his essay on the development of the Molluscs, 1875) to give the name of archenteron to the primitive gut and blastoporus to the primitive mouth.