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"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has ever seen a furious rabbit?" "Don't the bucks fight?" questioned Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau admitted the point. "I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his forehead, doing no serious damage happily.
Indeed they assert that, according to the original laws of nature, females were intended to be larger than males, and maintain this dogma by reference to the earliest formations of life in insects, and in the most ancient family of the vertebrata viz., fishes in both of which the females are generally large enough to make a meal of their consorts if they so desire.
In the primary division of the animal kingdom, we find the type in the radiata, not one of which lives out of water. In the vertebrata, it is in the fishes. In both of these, feet are totally wanting. Descending to the class mammalia, we have this type in the cetacea, which present a comparatively slight development of limbs.
And, first of all, we have to begin with the group of the Vertebrata vertebrata animals vertebrata being a word which explains itself. Of course we ourselves belong to this group. In fact, we are at the head of it; but it descends far below us. It goes on to the frog and the fish, and includes the monkey, the ox, the fowl and the lizard; for all these creatures possess the vertebral column.
The Teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or one of the higher Vertebrata, was made with the precise structure which it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow.
Among the vertebrata in general, progress is marked by an increasing heterogeneity in the vertebral column, and more especially in the vertebræ constituting the skull: the higher forms being distinguished by the relatively larger size of the bones which cover the brain, and the relatively smaller size of those which form the jaw, etc.
The fulfilment of all legislative decisions still devolves on the original directive centres: the impulse passing from the Parliament to the Ministers and from the Ministers to the King, in whose name everything is done; just as those smaller, first-developed ganglia, which in the lowest vertebrata are the chief controlling agents, are still, in the brains of the higher vertebrata, the agents through which the dictates of the cerebrum are worked out.
"The teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or in the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure which it exhibits, to make the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow.
We cannot, for instance, suppose that in the embryos of the vertebrata the peculiar loop-like courses of the arteries near the branchial slits are related to similar conditions in the young mammal which is nourished in the womb of its mother, in the egg of the bird which is hatched in a nest, and in the spawn of a frog under water.
In the higher Vertebrata the branchiae have wholly disappeared but in the embryo the slits on the sides of the neck and the loop-like course of the arteries still mark their former position.
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