United States or Gambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And yet I had no object in going, no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size.
They are wanting in the lower aquatic vertebrates. Rudimentary lachrymal glands from a human embryo of four months. They secrete the milk for the feeding of the new-born mammal. In spite of their unusual size these structures are nothing more than large sebaceous glands in the skin.
When we bear in mind that Britain has now not one peculiar mammal, and France but few distinct from those of Germany, and so with Hungary, Spain, etc., but that each of these kingdoms possesses several peculiar breeds of cattle, sheep, etc., we must admit that many domestic breeds must have originated in Europe; for whence otherwise could they have been derived? So it is in India.
I trembled at the sight and as the seconds passed I grew more terrified and for good reason. What would happen to me if any of those whirling columns of water and mist struck the dead whale? If they burst upon the drifting mammal where would I be? What would happen to the Wavecrest? And then quite suddenly there came a change in the on-rushing tornado.
And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such grace and fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal a squirrel or a marmoset of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes, the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small beasties.
The first and most decisive is that the great reptiles have practically disappeared before the mammals come on the scene. Over the earth generally the geological record shows the great reptiles dying from some invisible scourge long before any mammal capable of doing them any harm appears; even if we suppose that the mammal mainly attacked the eggs and the young.
What if, as some think, our millionth cousin, the tiger or cat, is anatomically a better mammal than I? His teeth and claws and magnificent muscles are of small value compared with man's mental power. What a comedy that man should work so hard to prove that his chief glory is his opposable thumb, or a few ounces of brain matter!
Why the line of man's descent was not cut off, who knows? It is a vain speculation. There can be little doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time, and probably escaping them by his greater agility, perhaps by his arboreal habits.
And the higher power of association and inference which we call understanding, aided by memory, results in the power of learning by experience, so characteristic of higher vertebrates. The hunted bird or mammal very quickly becomes wary. A new trap catches more than a better old one until the animals have learned to understand it, and young animals are trapped more easily than old.
That man in his whole bodily frame is a true mammal, becomes obvious as soon as the natural unity of this highest class of animals is recognised. The simplest comparison must have convinced the unprejudiced observer of the close constitutional relationship between man and the ape, which of all the Mammals comes nearest him.
Word Of The Day