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Had it been a monad, a mere living cell, which Galvanism evolved from the solution, and had this primary product developed itself afterwards in various forms, according to the ascending scale of a progressively improving organization, it might have accorded admirably with the twofold doctrine of spontaneous generation and transmutation of species; but, unfortunately, the first process is so perfect, in the present instance, as to leave little room for the second, and we are almost tempted to hope that perhaps the clumsy and troublesome expedient of a transmutation of species may yet be superseded by the discovery of some method, we know not what, whereby not only the articulata, but the vertebrata, and even Man himself, may be immediately produced by some new combination of Nature's elemental laws!

Higher and Lower-level Valley-gravels. Loess or Inundation-mud of the Nile, Rhine, etc. Origin of Caverns. Remains of Man and extinct Quadrupeds in Cavern Deposits. Cave of Kirkdale. Australian Cave-breccias. Geographical Relationship of the Provinces of living Vertebrata and those of extinct Post-pliocene Species. Extinct struthious Birds of New Zealand. Climate of the Post-pliocene Period.

The sounds produced by fishes are said in some cases to be made only by the males during the breeding-season. All the air-breathing Vertebrata necessarily possess an apparatus for inhaling and expelling air, with a pipe capable of being closed at one end.

The mollusca are typified in the soft, mucous, sluggish intestina. And, finally, in the fleshy living mass which surrounds the bony and hollow axis of the polypi natantes, we have a sketch of the vertebrata. The acrita thus appear as a prophecy of the higher events of animal development.

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 Cælenterata 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.

The earliest known vertebrate remains are those of Fishes; and Fishes are the most homogeneous of the vertebrata. Later and more heterogeneous are Reptiles. Later still, and more heterogeneous still, are Birds and Mammals.

This seems a general rule in the whole class in respect to the many remarkable structural differences between the sexes. We shall hereafter find the same law prevailing throughout the great sub-kingdom of the Vertebrata; and in all cases it is eminently distinctive of characters which have been acquired through sexual selection.

The lowest Vertebrata are perfectly limbless, and if, as most Darwinians would probably assume, the primeval vertebrate creature was also apodal, how are the preservation and development of the first rudiments of limbs to be accounted for such rudiments being, on the hypothesis in question, infinitesimal and functionless?

Seeing, for instance, that the oldest known mammals, reptiles, and fish strictly belong to their own proper classes, though some of these old forms are in a slight degree less distinct from each other than are the typical members of the same groups at the present day, it would be vain to look for animals having the common embryological character of the Vertebrata, until beds far beneath the lowest Silurian strata are discovered a discovery of which the chance is very small.

I was at school with her. 'So I understood. Were you great friends? 'No, replied Miss Rylance, decisively; 'if we had been at school for as many years as it took to evolve man from the lowest of the vertebrata we should not have been friends. 'I understand. The thousandth part of an inch, unbridged, is as metaphysically impassable as the gulf which divides us from the farthest nebula.