113 MEMORIAL SKETCH. . 



merely of the dredging expeditions conducted by my colleagues 

 (Professor Wyville Thomson and Mr. J. Gvvyn Jeffreys) and 

 myself, but also of the like exploration carried on by the 

 United States Coast Survey in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. 

 [One of the most characteristic examples of it is presented by 

 the little Rhizocritius Lofotensis ; the discovery of which by 

 G. Sars, off the coast of Norway, in 1866, gave the start to our 

 own work. For this is clearly a dwarfed and deformed repre- 

 sentative of the highly-developed Apiocrimis (Pear encrinite) 

 of the Bradford clay (Wiltshire Oolite) ; which, as my friend 

 Wyville Thomson said, " seems to have been going to the bad 

 " for millions of years,'' under the influence of a reduced 

 temperature.] 



To most English naturalists it seems premature at present 

 to attempt to construct a pedigree of the animal kingdom 

 generally, as has been done by Professor Haeckel and other 

 naturalists in Germany. It appears that the palseontological as 

 well as the developmental history of each group must be much 

 more completely ascertained before any but tentative arrange- 

 ments of this kind can be formed. Thus, while some of us 

 have found no difficulty in believing that all existing birds have 

 arisen from one common stock, the derivation of that stock from 

 a common stirps with the reptilian at first appeared almost 

 inconceivable ; birds and reptiles being physiologically almost 

 the antithesis of each other. But the discovery of the Archse- 

 opteryx has shown that a true bird may have a prolonged and 

 distinctly jointed tail. The careful comparison made by Mr. 

 Seeley of the skull of the Pterodactyl with that of the Fowl, led 

 him to conclude that the former must have had a development 

 of brain scarcely inferior to the latter, and was likely, therefore, 

 to have had a circulation as vigorous and complete as that of 

 birds. [And the researches of Professor Marsh in the Cretaceous 

 strata of North America, have brought together a vast numljer 

 of "missing links" in the form of Pterodactyls which resemble 

 birds in the want of teeth, and cf birds which correspond with 

 reptiles in the possession of them.] Further, the development 

 of the Struthious birds, which were formerly supposed to have 

 the closest mammalian affinities, is now found to be much mure 



