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By a similarly narrow and incomplete view the assertion that human conceptions, such as "the vertebrate idea," &c., are ideas in the mind of God, is sometimes ridiculed; as if the assertors either on the one hand pretended to some prodigious acuteness of mind a far-reaching genius not possessed by most naturalists or, on the other hand, as if they detected in the very phenomena furnishing such special conception evidences of Divine imaginings.

They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts. Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated, a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other.

It is true that the females of some species, both in the vertebrate and insect kingdoms, do exercise a preference; but in a vast majority of species the male takes the female he finds, or that he is able to win from other competitors; and if we go to the reptile class we find that in the ophidian order, which excels in variety and richness of colour, there is no such thing as preferential mating; and if we go to the insect class, we find that in butterflies, which surpass all creatures in their glorious beauty, the female gives herself up to the embrace of the first male that appears, or else is captured by the strongest male, just as she might be by a mantis or some other rapacious insect.

But we have also many important grounds in comparative anatomy and ontogeny for assuming a common origin for all the Vertebrates. If the general theory of evolution is correct, all the Vertebrates, including man, come from a single common ancestor, a long-extinct "Primitive Vertebrate." Hence the genealogical tree of the Vertebrates is at the same time that of the human race.

All physiologists admit that the swimbladder is homologous, or "ideally similar," in position and structure with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals: hence there seems to me to be no great difficulty in believing that natural selection has actually converted a swimbladder into a lung, or organ used exclusively for respiration.

We need to be continually reminded of our indebtedness in a thousand ways to the lowest and most insignificant forms of life. Man is a vertebrate animal.

The molluscan and articulate lines, though divergent, are of great importance to us as throwing a certain amount of light on vertebrate development; and still more as showing how a certain line of development may seem, and at first really be, advantageous, and still lead to degeneration, or at best to but partial success.

The remains of nearly one hundred species of vertebrate life have been found in the rocks, of which more than one-half are found living to-day, and none of the survivors show material change. The word hypothesis is a synonym used by scientists for the word guess; it is more dignified in sound and more imposing to the sight, but it has the same meaning as the old-fashioned, every-day word, guess.

Strange as the assertion will be thought, our Houses of Parliament discharge, in the social economy, functions which are in sundry respects comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal.

Did you ever watch the sea-gulls flashing and darting about, and then floating quietly above your head, or the swallows in their rapid flight, wheeling round and round, and think how beautiful a thing it is just to see them on the wing, fluttering, soaring, floating in that ocean of air which is their home? Birds are marked off from all other vertebrate animals by the possession of feathers.