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Thus, in 1860, he was well prepared to follow up Darwin's words in the Origin of Species, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," and to furnish proofs in the field of Development and Vertebrate Anatomy, which were not among Darwin's many specialities.
March had out the vertebrate, and was consulting one of its glittering ribs and glancing up from it at a house before which they stood. "Yes, it's the number; but do they call this being ready October first?"
This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them: If it were, if it might be, if it could be, if it had been. One portion of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining, always imagining. These are the people whose backbones remain cartilaginous all their lives long, as do those of certain other vertebrate animals, the sturgeons, for instance.
The work of interpretation of vertebrate fossils, the foundations of which were so solidly laid by Cuvier, was carried on, with wonderful vigour and success, by Agassiz in Switzerland, by Von Meyer in Germany, and last, but not least, by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a multitude of workers have laboured in the same field.
I cannot here resist the temptation to notice one of those small points in which the accuracy of the Bible is so constantly brought to light. The popular notion of angels gives them wings as well as hands a form quite impossible from the natural history point of view; all animals of the vertebrate orders never have more than two pairs of limbs. And in winged animals the fore-limbs become wings.
We ought also to compare the relative proportional numbers, at any two periods, of the high and low classes throughout the world: if, for instance, at the present day fifty thousand kinds of vertebrate animals exist, and if we knew that at some former period only ten thousand kinds existed, we ought to look at this increase in number in the highest class, which implies a great displacement of lower forms, as a decided advance in the organisation of the world.
The individual is thus at liberty to say: "The force which never failed before is not likely to fail in my case. The fertility of resource which circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am a vertebrate, breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative expression of my own will probably not fall short now that I have immediate use for it.
The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series. Dr.
How long it took evolution to bridge the chasm between the vertebrate and the invertebrate, between the fish and the frog, between the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and the mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the highest, who can guess?
The very complex molecular movements inside the neural cells, which we describe comprehensively as "the life of the soul," can no more exist in the vertebrate, and therefore in man, without their organs than the circulation without the heart and blood.
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