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Updated: May 4, 2025
The number of orders of animals, on the other hand, may be reckoned at a hundred and twenty, or thereabouts, and of these, eight or nine have no living representatives. The proportion of extinct ordinal types of animals to the existing types, therefore, does not exceed seven per cent. a marvellously small proportion when we consider the vastness of geologic time.
I think that that is a very astounding, a most astonishing fact, seeing the enormous epochs of time which have elapsed during the constitution of the surface of the earth as it at present exists; it is, indeed, a most astounding thing that the proportion of extinct ordinal types should be so exceedingly small. But now, there is another point of view in which we must look at this past creation.
And in any case, counting gives us what mathematicians call the ordinal number of our terms; that is to say, it arranges our terms in an order or series, and its result tells us what type of series results from this arrangement. In other words, it is impossible to count things without counting some first and others afterwards, so that counting always has to do with order.
These examples might be greatly multiplied, but they suffice to show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.
Yet "crabs or lobsters, worms, cuttle-fish, snails, jelly-fish, star-fish, oysters, the polyps lived contemporaneously with the first known vertebrate animals that ever came into being all as clearly defined by unmistakable ordinal or special characters as they are at the present moment." The foot of the horse is considered by zoölogists as "one of the most beautiful contrivances in nature."
When the dean of Christ's Church insisted on the use of the Roman Ordinal, he was denounced by the bishop-elect as "an ass-headed dean and a blockhead who cared only for his belly," and when Browne ventured to suggest that the ceremony should be delayed until a decision could be sought, he was attacked as "an apicure," whose only object was "to take up the proxies of any bishopric to his own gluttonous use."
There is no known extinct order of Birds, and no certainly known extinct order of Mammals, the ordinal distinctness of the "Toxodontia" being doubtful.
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