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And, as a necessary consequence of any sort of perfection, of mechanical perfection as of others, you find that the horse is a beautiful creature, one of the most beautiful of all land-animals. Look at the perfect balance of its form, and the rhythm and force of its action.
For we cannot call the mullet corn-destroying, the trout grape-eating, nor the barbel or seapike seed-gathering, as we do some land-animals, signifying their hurtfulness by these epithets. Nay, those little mischiefs which we complain of in these house-creatures, a weasel or fly, none can justly lay upon the greatest fish.
The white ivory tusks of this creature were carefully measured by Fred, and found to be thirty inches long. The resemblance of the walrus to our domestic land-animals has obtained for it, among sailors, the names of the sea-horse and sea-cow, and the records of its ferocity when attacked are numerous.
So the plants on high mountains have their upper leaves more divided, as pimpinella, petroselinum, and others, because here the air is thinner, and thence a larger surface of contact is required. The stream of water also passes but once along the gills of fish, as it is sooner deprived of its virtue; whereas the air is both received and ejected by the action of the lungs of land-animals.
But the most singular and instructive of all these embryonic reminiscences of the past is found in the fact that all the higher land-animals of to-day clearly reproduce a fish-stage in their embryonic development. The bird, the dog, the horse all the higher land animals, in a word, pass through the same phase.
Moreover, we should not overlook, in the Biblical account, that the benediction which God gives to the animals of the water and the air, at the end of the fifth day, is in the sixth day not pronounced over the land-animals although they certainly are as much entitled to it as fish and birds but over man.
Of course, it is presupposed that the land-animals naturally partake of the benediction of man, so far as it can be due to them; the benediction, namely, of fertility and of increase. According to these indications and to the Biblical conception, man stands in still another and closer connection with the animal world than in that of mere supremacy over it.
If we further suppose that this primitive being extended the range of his hunting, from insects and small or dead birds to small land-animals, the stimulation would be all the greater. In a word, the very fact of a change from the trees to the ground suggests a line of brain-development which may plausibly be conceived, in the course of a million years, to evolve an Ape-Man out of a man-like ape.
Here is ginger, yams, and other very good roots for the pot, that our men saw and tasted. What other fruits or roots the country affords I know not. Here are hogs and dogs; other land-animals we saw none. The fowls we saw and knew were pigeons, parrots, cockadores, and crows like those in England; a sort of birds about the bigness of a blackbird, and smaller birds many.
We should infer this from the nature of the animals characteristic of the period; for, though land-animals were introduced, and the organic world was no longer exclusively marine, there were as yet none of the higher beings in whom respiration is an active process.
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