DISTRIBUTION OF OEGANISMS. 217 



all the reptilian orders, the batrachian is that which has best 

 pretensions to a place in the pedigree of the Primates. " It 

 is singular," says Dr. Roget, " that the frog, though so low in 

 the scale of vertebrated animals, should bear a striking resem- 

 blance to the human conformation in its organs of progressive 

 motion." It is the only animal besides man with a calf to its 

 leg. It evidently " is making," says Dr. Roget, " an approxi- 

 mation to the higher orders of mammalia." The frog, however, 

 is but a humble oifshoot of the main line terminating in the 

 Primates. In these things the superficial thinker will only 

 see matter of ridicule : the large-hearted and truly devout 

 man, who puts nothing of nature away from him, will, on the 

 contrary, discover in them interesting traces of the ways of 

 God to man, and a deeper breathing of the lesson, that what- 

 ever lives is to him kindred. 



Our view of the animal kingdom is now completed, and I 

 venture to claim for it the character of being, with all neces- 

 sary and unavoidable imperfections, the only approach yet 

 made to a truly natural classification. Proceeding everywhere 

 upon obvious affinities, most of them admitted by zoologists, 

 or else upon equally acknowledged facts in the doctrine of 

 embryology, it presents an arrangement in almost every point 

 conformable to palaeontology, or the geological history of 

 animals upon earth. Nay more j so far is that history from 

 being irreconcileable with any assumed progress of animated 

 being from simple to complex forms, that I would now say, 

 any discoveries violently altering it, or doing more than filling 

 up its blanks, would be at issue with the true plan of being, 

 and a source of doubt with regard to the whole of our hy- 

 pothesis of creation. 



It now appears that we may regard the animal kingdom 

 (and by analogy the vegetable also) as composed of series of 

 forms, each usually taking an origin in the lowest sub-kingdom, 

 and afterwards passing through higher grades, but not in every 

 case through all, until the highest is reached. It appears that 

 the grand matrix of organic being is the sea, though this is 

 not to be held as excluding fluids of lesser mass, and different 

 character, from their share in this phenomenon. Regarding 

 the ocean as the grand medium of life, we see what may be 

 called trunk lines of being passing through it, as high as the 

 mammalia, with terrestrial families shooting off at various 

 points, or forming the terminations or "capitals" of the main 

 lines, passages, however, being observed in some instances to 



