86 REPTILIAN WATER TRESPASSERS. 



so expert that for his own amusement he wrote a sort 

 of novel, composed of letters written by seven corres- 

 pondents, each in a different language. 



A mind thus trained was sure to see a new fact in 

 various lights, and to grasp at once the relations 

 which it would hold with other facts. No idea ever 

 presents itself alone to such a mind, but is immediately 

 grouped about with other ideas gathered from various 

 sources, but all bearing on that one point. 



Now let us see how it happened that a poet dis- 

 covered the homologies of the skeleton. 



He was walking, and saw a skull I believe of a 

 deer lying on the ground. There was nothing very 

 noteworthy in this. Thousands of skulls had been 

 examined by professed anatomists, who were familiar 

 with every part of them, and the use of every hollow, 

 projection, or perforation ; and yet none of them had 

 detected in the skull its relationship to the rest of the 

 skeleton. It is possible that the very same skull had 

 been seen by many persons, who saw in it nothing 

 more than a familiar object. 



To the eye of the poet, the skull was a revelation. 

 It lay with the base towards him, and it suddenly 

 flashed across his mind that the occipital bone was,' in 

 fact, nothing but a vertebra modified, the large hole at 

 the base of the skull being an enlargement of the hole 

 in the vertebra through which the spinal cord passes, 

 and the disc-shaped bone itself nothing but the vertebra 

 flattened. The next thought evidently was to the effect 

 that if one part of the skull were a modified vertebra, 

 the other parts had probably the same origin, the 

 hollow of the skull being a still further enlargement of 



