452 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. it. 



Australian cluck -bill, possesses many bird-like characteristics. 

 In the man and the oak, we get perhaps the widest possible 

 amount of divergence between organisms; yet at the bottom 

 of the animal and vegetal kingdoms, we find creatures like 

 the amoeba and protococcus, which cannot be classified as 

 either animal or vegetal, because they are as much one as 

 the other. 



Moreover, as we go back in time, we find the lines of 

 development, now so widely distant from each other, con- 

 tinually drawing together. As a general rule, extinct animals 

 are less specialized than surviving animals ; and the same is 

 true of plants. The ancient animal departed less widely 

 from the general type of the class or sub-kingdom to which 

 he belonged than the modern animal. The monotremata, 

 which of all mammals are the least remote from reptiles and 

 birds, are at the same time the oldest. In the teleosts or 

 true fishes the differential characteristics of the vertebrate 

 type are more strongly pronounced than in the older 

 selachians, to which order belongs the shark. Far back, in 

 secondary times, we find lizards strongly resembling fishes, 

 and other saurian creatures which differ little from birds. 

 Confining our attention to any particular group, such as that 

 which embraces the ruminants and pachyderms, we find the 

 hipparion of the Eocene epoch less specialized than either of 

 his later kindred, the horse, ass, zebra, and quagga ; while 

 the gap between such dissimilar animals as the pig and the 

 camel is to a great extent filled by transitional forms found 

 in various tertiary strata. 



Again, it hardly needs stating that, as we proceed from a 

 general survey of any group of animals or plants to a survey 

 of the sub-groups of which it is made up, we find the 

 differences constantly growing less numerous and less funda- 

 mental. The differences between the ox and the lion are 

 many and important ; but between the various members of 

 the order caruivora, between the lion and the wolf or the 



