172 THE PROGRESS OF DEGRADATION. 



is as unquestionably the part of the geologist to declare their 

 history, and the order of their succession in time. The ques- 

 tions which fall to be determined by the geologist and ana- 

 tomist are entirely different. It is the function of the ana- 

 tomist to decide regarding the high and the low, the typical 

 and the aberrant ; and so, beginning at what is lowest or 

 highest in the scale, or least or most symmetrical in type, he 

 passes through the intermediate forms to the opposite ex- 

 treme : and such is the order natural and proper to his science. 

 It is the vocation of the geologist, on the other hand, to de- 

 cide regarding the early and the late. It is with time^ not 

 with rank, that he has to deal. Nor is it in the least sur- 

 prising that he should seem at issue with the comparative 

 anatomist, when, in classifying his groupes of organized being 

 according to the periods of their appearance, there is an order 

 of arrangement forced upon him, different from that which, 

 on an entirely different principle, the anatomist pur-sues. 

 Nor can there be a better illustration of a collision of this 

 kind than the one furnished by the case in point. That pe- 

 culiarity of structure which, as the lowest in the vertebral 

 skeleton, is to the comparative anatomist the primary and 

 original one, and which, as such, furnishes him with his start- 

 ing point, is to the geologist not primary, but secondary, 

 simply because it was not primary, but secondary, in the 

 order of its occurrence. It belongs, so far as we yet know, 

 not to the Ji^rst period of vertebrate existence, but to the 

 second ; and appears in geologic history as does that savage 

 state which certain philosophers have deemed the original 

 condition of the human species, in the history of civilization, 

 when read by the light of the Kevealed Kecord, under the 

 shadow of those gigantic ruins of the East that date only a 

 few centuries after the Flood. It is found to be a degra- 

 dation fipst introduced during the lapse of an intermediate 

 age, — not the normal condition which obtained during the 



