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Our own speech is vertebrated and articulated by means of nouns, verbs, and the rules of grammar. A dog's speech is invertebrate, but I do not see how it is possible to deny that it possesses all the essential elements of language.
It is interesting to note that the modern teleosts in their embryological growth pass through the stages which characterized the maturity of their Devonian ancestors; their skeleton is cartilaginous and their tail fin vertebrated. The Carboniferous system is so named from the large amount of coal which it contains.
There are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign. So writes Coleridge; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language as 'fossil poetry. He evidently means that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their portion, so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever.
Vertebrated animals are all furnished with a head, containing a brain, which gives its orders to the whole body; they have all an internal skeleton, that is to say, a system of bones linked together, forming a solid base by which all the organs are supported.
"The British Empire," I said, "is like some of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone, that is to say, especially in the visceral region is bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone.
But I reserve this subject to the end of my letters, when you will have heard all, and be able to judge for yourself. It would be plunging back into confusion to attempt to examine all the vertebrated classes at once. After making a division you must go on.
If I say that respiration is performed by the lungs; that digestion is effected in the stomach; that the eye is the organ of sight; that the jaws of a vertebrated animal never open sideways, but always up and down; while those of an annulose animal always open sideways, and never up and down I am enumerating propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid.
There can be no doubt that many of the Arthropods, a division of animals more ancient and even now more prevalent than the Vertebrata, have undergone more phylogenetic modification" a beautiful phrase "than even the most modified of vertebrated animals. Simple forms like the lobsters display a primitive structure parallel with that of the fishes.
And they think I'm going to crawl about on my stomach on my vertebrated stomach! "Stomach," he repeated slowly, as though he chewed the indignity. Then suddenly, with a sort of fury, he made three vast strides and leapt towards them. He leapt badly; he made a series of somersaults in the air, whirled right over them, and vanished with an enormous splash amidst the cactus bladders.
Hence, since the glossopetrae are altogether similar to sharks' teeth, they must have been produced by sharklike fishes; and since many fossil shells correspond, down to the minutest details of structure, with the shells of existing marine or freshwater animals, they must have been produced by similar animals; and the like reasoning is applied by Steno to the fossil bones of vertebrated animals, whether aquatic or terrestrial.
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