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But how does this classification differ from that of the scientific Zoologist? How does the meaning of the scientific class-name of "Mammalia" differ from the unscientific of "Beasts"? Why, exactly because the former depends on a definition, the latter on a type. The class Mammalia is scientifically defined as "all animals which have a vertebrated skeleton and suckle their young."

They soon learn that their master is not to be feared, and, therefore, need not be resisted; but, beyond this dumb acceptance of a situation, they exhibit no trace of sympathetic recognition of our kind. It is clear that their mental endowments, though considerable, are very much more remote from our own than are those of the vertebrated animals with which we have formed a friendly association.

But how does this classification differ from that of the scientific Zoologist? How does the meaning of the scientific class-name of "Mammalia" differ from the unscientific of "Beasts"? Why, exactly because the former depends on a definition, the latter on a type. The class Mammalia is scientifically defined as "all animals which have a vertebrated skeleton and suckle their young."

The skin, like everything else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist, or hairy, as a vertebrated animal's would be. Along the crest of the head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes.

Philips in the Aymestry limestone, being apparently the first examples of vertebrated animals which breathed upon our planet. In the upper Ludlow rocks, remains of six genera of fish have been for a longer period known; they belong to the order of cartilaginous fishes, an order of mean organization and ferocious habits, of which the shark and sturgeon are living specimens.

Among the lower animals, up even to those first cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case.

In the same year in which he took his degree, we find him coming before the scientific world through the medium of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, with a series of elaborate papers, entitled "The Development of the Vascular System in the Foetus in Vertebrated Animals," a contribution which is admitted on all hands, we believe, to be perhaps the highest and safest authority on its intricate and recondite subject-matter that as yet exists.

A step higher in the scale, among the placental Mammals, the structure of the brain acquires a vast modification not that it appears much altered externally, in a Rat or in a Rabbit, from what it is in a Marsupial nor that the proportions of its parts are much changed, but an apparently new structure is found between the cerebral hemispheres, connecting them together, as what is called the 'great commissure' or 'corpus callosum. The subject requires careful re-investigation, but if the currently received statements are correct, the appearance of the 'corpus callosum' in the placental mammals is the greatest and most sudden modification exhibited by the brain in the whole series of vertebrated animals it is the greatest leap anywhere made by Nature in her brain work.

If I say that respiration is performed by the lungs; that digestion is effected in the stomach; that the eye is the organ of sight; that the jaws of a vertebrated animal never open sideways, but always up and down; while those of an annulose animal always open sideways, and never up and down I am enumerating propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid.

In this room, as in the previous rooms, the vertebrated animals are grouped in the wall cases or on the top of the cases. It is hardly necessary to guide the visitor systematically through the intricacies of a collection, every beast, bird, fish, and shell of which is native to his own land.