578 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



had passed that living creatures found a voice. Apart 

 from the instrumental noises of some insects, it was 

 not until the advent of Amphibians in the Carboniferous 

 age that the silence of nature was broken by any voice of 

 life. It is useful to fix attention on one race and to note 

 what they achieved, and no one surely can look at the 

 fossil remains of the Carboniferous Amphibians without 

 a thrill. They are the remains of pioneers the first back- 

 boned animals to begin the possession of the dry land, 

 the first to have finger and toes and thus the power 

 of feeling things in three dimensions, the first to have a 

 voice and a mobile tongue, and the first to have true lungs. 

 How many acquisitions these early Amphibians made ! 



Mr. W. D. Matthew, of the American Museum of Natural 

 History, has written appreciatively concerning Eryops, 

 a primitive Amphibian which lived about the close of the 

 Carboniferous Period ' five times as old as Eohippus (an 

 early ancestor of the modern horse), a hundred times as 

 old as the mammoth or mastodon or the earliest known 

 remains of man '. It was ' a sort of gigantic tadpole or 

 mud-puppy, with wide flat head, no neck, a thick heavy 

 body, short legs and paddle-like feet and a heavy flattened 

 tail '. Heavy and clumsy, small- brained and slow, but 

 it was near the top of the genealogical tree in its day, and 

 it was rich in promise ! ' The giant dragon-fly that darted 

 over the head of the slow- crawling Eryops might seem, 

 except in size, a far superior type of being, a far more 

 promising candidate for the position of ancestor to the 

 intelligent life which was to appear in the dim future '. 

 But the facts were far otherwise. The giant dragon-fly 

 had already reached the limit of great organizational 

 change, while ' the amphibian was but beginning the 



