SPECIAL CREATION OR DERIVATION? 



Confining our attention to animals, we meet 

 first with the coelenterata, including sponges, 

 corals, and medusas, characterized by the union 

 of masses of amceba-like units, with but little 

 specialization of structure or of function. Be- 

 side these lowly forms, but not immediately 

 above any one of them, we find echinoderms 

 starting ofFin one direction, worms orannuloida 

 in a second, and molluscoida in a third. Fol- 

 lowing the first road, we stop short with echino- 

 derms. But on the second, we find annuloid 

 worms succeeded by articulata, or true annu- 

 losa — which re-diverge in sundry directions, 

 reaching the greatest divergence from the primi- 

 tive forms in the crabs, spiders, and ants. On 

 the third road, we find the molluscoid worms 

 diverging into mollusks and vertebrates. On 

 the one hand, through the bryozoa we are 



Protists — comprising such organisms as are neither distinctively 

 animal nor vegetable. There is something to be said in behalf 

 of such an arrangement, provided no attempt be made to draw 

 a hard and fast line between the protistic and the two higher 

 kingdoms ; and I suppose that no follower of Haeckel is likely 

 to make such an attempt. Since a bacterium or a vibrio is 

 clearly not an animal, and clearly not a vegetable, while it 

 is clearly a living thing, there would seem to be some con- 

 venience in having a region to which to assign it. I should, 

 however, regard this "region " of protists, or lowest organ- 

 isms, as not stricdy a " kingdom," but rather as the indefi- 

 nite border-land between the animal and vegetal worlds 

 on the one hand and the realm of inorganic existence on the 

 other. 



389 



