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Updated: June 28, 2025
Since so much of their work must of necessity take them over that vast stretch of salt water lying between the Florida coast and the far distant Mexican shore line, the wise men in Washington had supplied Jack with a speedy plane of the amphibian type, capable of making landings either on shore or in any of the numerous inlets dotting the coast, it being equipped with both aluminum pontoons and adjustable wheels.
It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants; in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.
But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call such creatures amphibious, which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the land and in the water. The first frog who crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian.
That the manward impulse should never have been lost in all the appalling vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have pushed steadily on, through mollusk and fish and amphibian and reptile, through swimming and creeping and climbing things, and that the forms that conveyed it should have escaped the devouring monsters of the earth, sea, and air till it came to its full estate in a human being, is the wonder of wonders.
And their sons and daughters, and the sons and daughters of two more generations were warmed by a new sun, nourished by food grown in alien soil, taught the mind contact by the amphibian mermen with whom the space voyagers had made an early friendship each succeeding child more attuned to the new home, less tied to the far-off world he had never seen or would see.
Such an idea carried with it in her mind a certain contempt for a social amphibian, a being half-secretary, half-bailiff, and yet neither the one nor the other, a poor relation, an embarrassing friend. "Because, countess," he answered with perfect ease of manner, "there are no thanks due. I am Adam's friend, and it gives me pleasure to take care of his interests."
"I hope we run across you boys again some day, and please keep your lip buttoned about our being down here with an amphibian to knock some of these smugglers of Chinks and rum galley-west." "You can depend on us to keep mum, Jack," the red-headed ex-harbor tug engineer assured him.
He used no tobacco, was wedded to the daily cold bath, and was a regular amphibian for splashing. He had a system of calisthenics which he followed as religiously as the Mohammedan prays to the East. The pasteboard proclivity was not one of his accomplishments. But a few months before his death he was missed one day at the works.
He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco, but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented. A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was not yet developed.
He cast upon his four superiors sitting at table, and also upon Sibilet, that look of mingled distrust and servility which serves as a veil to the thoughts of the peasantry; then he brandished his amphibian with a triumphant air. "Here it is!" he cried, addressing Blondet. "My otter!" returned the Parisian, "and well paid for."
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