THE PROGRESS OF DEGRADATION. J 55 



THE PROGEESS OF DEGRADATION. 

 ITS HISTORY. 



Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life which 

 their instincts teach them to pursue, naturalists have learned 

 to recognise among them certain aberrant and mutilated forms, 

 in which the type of the special class to which they belong 

 seems distorted and degraded. They exist as the monster 

 /amilies of creation, just as among families there appear from 

 time to time monster individuals^ — men, for instance, with- 

 out feet, or hands, or eyes, or with their feet, hands, or eyes 

 grievously misplaced, — sheep with their fore legs growing 

 out of their necks, or ducklings with their wings attached to 

 their haunches. Among these degraded races, that of the 

 footless serpent, which " goeth upon its belly," has been long 

 noted by the theologian as a race typical, in its condition and 

 nature, of an order of hopelessly degraded beings, borne down 

 to the dust by a clinging curse ; and, curiously enough, when 

 the first comparative anatomists in the world give their 

 readiest and most prominent instance of degradation among 

 the denizens of the natural world, it is this very order of foot- 

 less reptiles that they select. So far as the geologist yet 

 knows, the Ophidians did not appear during the Secondaiy 

 ages, when the monarchs of creation belonged to the reptilian 



