Darwinism Verified. 23 



primitive forms remind one in many ways of the 

 batrachians. A batrachian, in turn, is an animal 

 which ends its life as a kind of reptile after hav- 

 ing begun it as a kind of imperfectly specialized 

 fish. Again, the lowest known vertebrate, the 

 amphioxus, usually ranked with fishes, though 

 hardly specialized enough to be called a true fish, 

 exhibits marks of actual relationship with the 

 ascidian, which is nothing more than a worm of 

 the order known as tunicata. No two animals 

 could be less like each other than a bee and a 

 nautilus, yet in their lowest members the two 

 sub-kingdoms of articulata and mollusks become 

 barely distinguishable from each other and from 

 the worms with which the vertebrate sub-kingdom 

 also becomes blended. It is on account of this 

 convergence of types as we descend in the scale 

 that naturalists have found it so difficult to clas- 

 sify satisfactorily those lower organisms which Cu- 

 vier roughly grouped together as radiata. Par- 

 allel phenomena recur as we reach the confines of 

 the animal and vegetal kingdoms, and meet with 

 numbers of organisms which there is as much 

 reason for assigning to the one kingdom as to the 

 other. All this complicated arrangement of or- 

 ganisms in groups within groups, resembling each 

 other at the bottom of the scale, and differing 



