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Updated: June 28, 2025
We see it groping its way like a blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling, awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strength first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at the end of Palæozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous, arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab, some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the production of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as the production of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through the mollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and the reptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal to the anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rude and savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man, hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our own era.
The hippopotamus reappeared amidst a smother of foam. Its wide-open jaws closed up on the gunwale of the dug-out. The canoe listed dangerously. The Birwas still further endangered its stability by standing upright and raining absolutely ineffectual blows with their paddles upon the armour-plated head of the amphibian.
This may involve a very distortionate and uncomely "scientific" boundary, and the joining together of distant and unrelated localities into a single district; such was the case in the famous original act of Governor Gerry, of Massachusetts, whence the practice obtained its amphibian name.
None of them knew the white Amphitrite even by name. Moreover, they did not have the devil-may-care and romantic appearance of the bachelor of the Marina, ready to live in the water like an amphibian.
The broad paddle of the fin is now useless, and its main stem is converted into a jointed, bony limb, with a five-toed foot, spreading into a paddle, at the end. But the legs are still feeble, sprawling supports, letting the heavy body down almost to the ground. The Amphibian is an imperfect, but necessary, stage in evolution.
The superfluous tissue of the gill-structures is used in the improvement of the ear and mouth-parts; a process that had begun in the Amphibian. The body is raised up higher from the ground, on firmer limbs; the ribs and the shoulder and pelvic bones the saddles by which the weight of the body is adjusted between the limbs and the backbone are strengthened and improved.
In their case the hypothesis has lately been advanced on the strength of very extensive research, especially by Friedrich Maurer, that they have been evolved from the cutaneous sense-organs of amphibian ancestors by modification of functions; the epidermic structure is very similar in both in its embryonic rudiments.
And so the sound rises and falls, swells and dwindles away in chords and harmonies, until presently every amphibian is alert and tremulous with emotion and emulation. If an attempt is made to analyse the music, you may discover sounds sharp as those of the fife, deep and hollow as drum-beats, sonorous and acrid, tinny and mellow.
Of the development of the Ganoidei we have unfortunately no knowledge, but their brains and their reproductive organs are more amphibian than are those of the Sharks.
Before Perk reached the last word his chum had gained his seat in the cubbyhole of the amphibian, and almost immediately called out: "Cut that rope and let me get away, partner hurry up before I get another and harder bump!" Ten seconds afterward the airship was entirely free from contact with the drifting sloop. Then came the roar of the motor showing that Jack had given her the gun.
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