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Updated: June 23, 2025
If you looked closely, you would notice, in the first place, a great many things very like animals with which you are acquainted now: you would see differences of shape and proportion, but on the whole a close similarity. I explained what I meant by ORDERS the other day, when I described the animal kingdom as being divided in sub-kingdoms, classes and orders.
He could call upon his vassal or tributary kings to aid him in war times or in any sudden emergency, but, as regards their internal arrangements the government, misgovernment, or non-government of their several sub-kingdoms they were free to act as they pleased, and he was not understood to have any formal jurisdiction. For all that Brian was an unmistakable king, and proved himself to be one.
Hence in these classes or sub-kingdoms, such as the Protozoa, Coelenterata, Echinodermata, Scolecida, secondary sexual characters, of the kind which we have to consider, do not occur: and this fact agrees with the belief that such characters in the higher classes have been acquired through sexual selection, which depends on the will, desire, and choice of either sex.
We have seen, however, that there are many instances of wonderfully close similarity which are not due to genetic affinity; the most notable instance, perhaps, being that brought forward by Mr. Murphy, namely, the appearance of the same eye-structure in the vertebrate and molluscous sub-kingdoms.
I mentioned that the whole of the animal kingdom is divisible into five sub-kingdoms; that each of these sub-kingdoms is again divisible into provinces; that each province may be divided into classes, and the classes into the successively smaller groups, orders, families, genera, and species.
Agassiz says that fishes existed contemporaneously with species of all the invertebrate sub-kingdoms in the Taconic, or sub-Cambrian strata. This is the extreme limit of known geological strata in which life is found to have existed.
I mentioned that the whole of the animal kingdom is divisible into five sub-kingdoms; that each of these sub-kingdoms is again divisible into provinces; that each province may be divided into classes, and the classes into the successively smaller groups, orders, families, genera, and species.
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.
The great gulfs that separate the animal kingdom into sub-kingdoms and classes existed then, and have continued till the present time.... If we rely on known fossils as evidence, we would be obliged to conclude that highly organized fishes were suddenly introduced.
Nevertheless, you must not for a moment suppose, because no such transitional forms are known, that the members of the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another.
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