ORIGIN OF OUR HANDS AND BACKBONE 547 



fishes' eggs, there may be seen in them series of bead-like 

 objects between which is a string; this string is called the 

 dorsal cord. It is the rudimentary, the baby backbone. 

 In the fish's egg this is cartilaginous (what the boys call 



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 OM MAMD5 AND ARMS 

 ALSO AIDIRD'5 

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Sketch of Man in Pose of a Bird 



gristle), and it is still only gristle in those holdovers 

 from a past age the sturgeon and -its relatives. 



The petrified fishes, the ancestors of the modern fish, 

 in the stone strata below the coal formation, when they 

 lived, all had gristle in place of a backbone. But all 

 the back-boned animals are linked together by the fact 

 that they have either a soft or hard backbone of some 



