United States or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Their dispositions are often sanguinary, since the forms most conspicuous among them live by rapine, and subsist on the blood of other animals. They are, in short, symbolically types of EVIL." This symbolical character is most conspicuous about the centre of the series of gradations: Kingdom . . . Annulosa. Sub-kingdom . . . Reptilia.
Now it is a most remarkable circumstance that, viewed on the great scale, living beings have differed so little throughout all geologic time that there is no sub-kingdom and no class wholly extinct or without living representatives.
But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, so that these are grouped into the still larger assemblage or "province" Articulata; and, finally, the relations which these have to worms and other lower animals, are expressed by combining the whole vast aggregate into the sub-kingdom of Annulosa.
Fairhurst says, in the work already quoted: "It is a most remarkable fact that in the first geological period in which undoubted fossils occur, all the sub-kingdoms except that of the vertebrates are well represented, and that there is no evidence from fossils that one sub-kingdom, or even that different classes of the same sub-kingdom were evolved from each other.
We will begin by copying a description of it from one of those class-books which suppose children to learn words like parrots, and to repeat them with just as little understanding. "Coral is formed by an animal belonging to the kingdom of Radiates, sub-kingdom Polypes. The soft body of the animal is attached to a support, the mouth opening upwards in a row of tentacles.
If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should have found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other animals into the sub-kingdom 'Protozoa'; if I had selected a fresh-water polype or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom 'Coelenterata', would have grouped themselves around my type; had a snail been chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and water, shells, the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have gradually linked themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of 'Mollusca'; and finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the same sub-kingdom of 'Vertebrata'.
There is no certainly known extinct order of Protozoa; there is but one among the Coelenterata that of the rugose corals; there is none among the Mollusca; there are three, the Cystidea, Blastoidea, and Edrioasterida, among the Echinoderms; and two, the Trilobita and Eurypterida, among the Crustacea; making altogether five for the great sub-kingdom of Annulosa.
It may have only been when a varied climate arose, that the originally few species branched off into the present extensive variety. It is necessary, in particular, to ascertain the grades which exist in the classification of animals. In the line of the aves, Mr. Swainson finds these to be nine, the species pica, for example, being thus indicated: Kingdom Animalia. Sub-kingdom Vertebrata.
We have also the sub-kingdom of shell-fish or molluscs, including cuttle-fishes, snails, whelks, limpets, the oyster, and a multitude of allied forms. A multitudinous sub-kingdom of worms also exists, as well as another of star-fishes and their congeners.
There is yet another of zoophytes, or polyps, and another of sponges, and, finally, we have a sub-kingdom of minute creatures, or animalculæ, of very varied forms, which may make up the sub-kingdom of Protozoa, consisting of animals which are mostly unicellular.
Word Of The Day