Pineal Eyes Once Looked Up To Sky.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19271, 7 January 1931, Page 6

Pineal Eyes Once Looked Up To Sky.

Nature Notes

By

James Drummond,

F.L.S., F.Z.S.

shy, and retiring, the tuatara, outwardly, is one of the most uninteresting creatures in New Zealand. In its structure it has features that stamp it as one of the most notable creatures in the world. These features link it up with animals of the remote past and stamp it with an ancient lineage that makes it an aristocrat, if ancient lineage is synonymous with aristocracy. The pineal eye shows a higher degree of structure in the tuatara than in any other living creature and this third eye, now functionless, is traced in a tiny body, shaped like a pine-cone, and containing sand-like particles, in the third hollow of the brain of all vertebrates, including man. The Greeks believed that it was the seat of man’s soul. In the tuatara, there are traces of two pineal eyes. The left one appears as an outgrowth from the fore-brain, slightly to the left of the nftiddle line, at a very early stage of development. The right one appears slightly later, and never reaches anything like the same degree of organisation as the left one. From these facts, it has been suggested that the ancestors of all existing vertebrates, including the ancestors of man, in addition to the ordinary pair of eyes, had two pineal eyes, side by side, on the top of the head, both functioning and both locking skywards.