LAND LIFE BEGINS 41 



of them are more like slender and badly-made limbs 

 than fins. So here is "a fish out of water" that is 

 not less comfortable than in water. It is the first 

 amphibian; a connecting link between life in water 

 and on land. 



But were there such fishes in the remote age which 

 we are considering? We have only to compare the 

 fossil remains of certain fishes belonging to that age 

 with the skeletons of our lung-fishes, and we know 

 that there were. These fishes are survivors of a great 

 family of lung-fishes of early times; and as we find 

 them so far apart as Queensland, Egypt, and Brazil, 

 it seems that this family must at one time have been 

 spread over the entire earth. Some branch of the 

 family, or some branch of the fish-world closely re- 

 lated to them, left the primitive waters and began the 

 important story of the evolution of the quadrupeds. 

 We are not quite sure from which branch of the 

 ancient fishes the quadrupeds came. If it was not 

 the lung-fishes themselves, it was some common 

 ancestor of the lung-fishes and another group. 



Let us come back for a moment to the gradual rise 

 of the land. It meant that enormous shallow seas 

 which had become densely peopled with fishes now 

 disappeared. It meant swifter and narrower rivers. 

 It meant less lakes and lagoons. It meant more 

 circulation of the moisture in the atmosphere. These 

 are the things to study, not dreamy speculations such 

 as you find in Professor Bergson, if you want to 



