All the Articles of the Darwin Faith. 17 



in the zoological series. We thus ( ! ) learn that man ia 

 descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail 

 and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an 

 inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole 

 structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have 

 been classed amongst the quadrumana, as surely as would 

 the common and still more ancient progenitor of the Old 

 and Xew World monkeys. The quadrumana and all the 

 higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient 

 marsupial animal : and this, through a long line of diver- 

 sified forms, either from some reptile-like or some amphi- 

 bian-like creature, and this again from fish-like animal. 

 In the dim obscurity of the past we can see (?) that the 

 early progenitor of all the vertebrata must have been ? an 

 aquatic animal, provided with branchiae, with the two sexes 

 united in the same individual, and with the most impor- 

 tant organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) im- 

 perfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more 

 like the larva of our existing marine Ascidians that any 

 other known form." 



I believe that an argument based on that which seems, 

 is quite as valuable as one based on that which is ; a chain 



