Abstract
“THE question of the nature of the mouth,” says Prof. Dohrn in one of the first of his celebrated “Studien zur Urgeschichte,” is the point about which the whole morphological problem of the Vertebrate body revolves.” According to Dohrn, the present mouth of Vertebrates arose from the coalescence of a pair of gill-clefts. In this we have an example of Dohrn's principle of change of function, and also, as I hope soon to demonstrate, of Kleinenberg's law of the substitution of organs. I do not now wish or intend to give an account of the researches by which Dohrn showed that the mouth in some cases first arises as a pair of lateral invaginations of epiblast, still less of my own small contribution to this question, which consisted in recording the facts that the mouth also resembles a gill-cleft in some other particulars.
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BEARD, J. The Old Mouth and the New: a Study in Vertebrate Morphology . Nature 37, 224–227 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037224d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037224d0