238 Dwellers of the Sea and Shore 



antecedents of our higher animals. The threads that 

 unite them with the past are often tangled and some- 

 times broken. But all such as we have been able to 

 guide ourselves by lead to the inevitable conclusion 

 that, like the horseshoe crab, every other living many- 

 celled creature had its beginning in a form which has 

 now long since perished forever. And it is to the story 

 of the unraveling of those strands and the uniting of 

 the broken ends that natural science owes some of its 

 most thrilling, most romantic, and most luminous pages. 



