502 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wider or sometimes to narrower possibilities. Mollusks took advantage 

 of the path, and many of them have reached even to life arboreal, while 

 some, apparently disheartened or diverted by seductive opportunities, 

 have gone back to water, still retaining, however, their air-breathing 

 organs to prove the roundabout course of their travels. 



The ancestral forms of insects doubtless followed the same broad 

 way, but so remote are these ancestors that we may best consider the 

 insects as primitively air-breathing. Some indeed are now aquatic, 

 but still air-breathers, and I doubt not have taken to aquatic life as a 

 fairly modern accomplishment. Vertebrates, however, give us the 

 greatest advance, for from the gilled fish, and early amphibian, to bird 

 or mammal is a long and striking course. If any branch of animals 

 is to be thought of as having had its origin on land rather than in 

 water, it must be the insects, that is, the immediate ancestral form to 

 all the groups of insects. Following back their ancestral line still 

 further we should doubtless reach an aquatic animal, but one not to 

 be recognized as in any degree insect-like in character. 



But life in the open air has not confined itself to particular places 

 or conditions. The pressure to occupy each niche of available terri- 

 tory is as strong here as in the water. Here too we may trace certain 

 w^ell-worn paths — paths that have been common to more than one group 

 of animals and traveled independently by each. Let us mention some 

 — subterranean, aquatic, terrestrial, arboreal, aerial. How many forms 

 in hosts of different groups have buried themselves more or less com- 

 pletely in mother earth and there found, or made for themselves, all 

 the necessary conditions for successful life. Earthworms, crustaceans, 

 insects too numerous to mention, mollusks and, among vertebrates, 

 frogs, snakes, lizards, turtles, birds, moles, beavers, gophers, ground- 

 hogs, badgers, etc. This for the general trend, many of these, how- 

 ever, taking peculiar and tortuous by-paths to reach the end desired. 

 From terrestrial back to aquatic life has been so frequent a course that 

 we can hardly call the road exceptional. So many insects of different 

 groups have become aquatic in either adult or larval life that it was 

 long held that the insects in general were derived from these aquatic 

 groups. None, I think it safe to say, has had such an immediate 

 ancestry, while aquatic beetles, bugs, caterpillars and even dragonflies, 

 caddicefiies, etc., have, I firmly believe, gradually assumed aquatic 

 habits as descendants of forms that lived on land. 



We can easily believe that frogs advanced from an aquatic to a 

 terrestrial condition, because we can actually see the process in the indi- 

 vidual history of each, but there is reason to believe that even among 

 certain batrachians aquatic life becomes more habitual and succeeds a 

 terrestrial stage. Even the frog himself becomes decidedly aquatic in 

 his old age, and for reptiles, while Ave often think of them as aquatic, 



