Abstract
IN the controversy respecting the ancestry of the Vertebrata the nervous system has always played an important part: that system is—I think Prof. Wiedersheim was the first to say it—the most aristocratic and conservative of all the organ systems of the animal body, and it clings to ancestral traditions more than any other. Anyone who has read Kleinenberg's marvellous account of the complicated manner in which the permanent nervous apparatus of the Annelid worm is built up from that of the larva (in which process of building up it passes through stages which can only be looked upon as ancestral), will readily agree that if we are ever to trace the ancestry of Vertebrates at all, the nervous system will probably form a significant factor in the solution.
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BEARD, J. Some Annelidan Affinities in the Ontogeny of the Vertebrate Nervous System . Nature 39, 259–261 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/039259b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039259b0
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