[E] After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.
[F] Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page 102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.
[H] “It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,” Herbert Spencer, section 33.
[I] “We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.
[J] From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.
There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the past thousand years, a mysterious individual—a sojourner in all lands, yet a citizen of none; professing the profoundest secrets of opulence, yet generally living in a state of poverty; astonishing every one by the vigor of his recollections, and the evidence of his intercourse with the eminent characters and events of every age, yet connected with none—without lineage, possession, or pursuit on earth—a wanderer and unhappy!
A number of histories have been written about him; some purely fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land of mysticism, has toiled the most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded on the fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the Author of the Christian faith.