MONISTIC EVOLUTION 125 



differences and difficulties which he neglects to state, 

 we can scarcely doubt that it is the same animal 

 after all. 



The little lancelet, or Amfl/tioxus. of the European 

 seas, a creature which was at one time thought to be 

 a sea-snail, but is really more akin to fishes, forms 

 his link of connection between our * fish ancestors 

 and the invertebrate animals. So important is it in 

 this respect that our author waxes eloquent in ex 

 horting us to regard it with special veneration, as 

 representing our earliest Silurian vertebrate ances 

 tors, as being of our own flesh and blood, and as 

 better worthy of being an object of * devoutest 

 reverence than the worthless rabble of so-calledi 

 &quot;saints.&quot; In describing this animal he takes pains 

 to inform us that it is more different from an ordinary 

 fish than a fish is from a man. Yet as he illustrates 

 its curious and unique structure, before we are aware 

 the lancelet is gone, and a fish is in its place, and this 

 fish with the potency to become a man in due time. 

 Thus a creature intermediate in some respects be 

 tween fishes and molluscs, or between fishes and 

 worms, but so far apart from either that it seems but 

 to mark the width of the gap between them, becomes 

 an easy stepping-stone from one to the other. 



In like manner the ascidians, or sea-squirts, mol 

 luscs of low grade, or, as Haeckel prefers to regard 

 them, allied to worms, are most remote in almost 

 every respect from the vertebrates. But in the young 



