DISTRIBUTION OF ORGANISMS. 197 



motion." It is the only animal besides man with a calf to its 

 leg. It evidently " is making," says Dr. Roget. " an approxi- 

 mation to the higher orders of mammalia." The frog, how- 

 ever, is but a humble offshoot of the main line terminating 

 in the Primates. There is something more like a lineal 

 predecessor of the order in the Labyrinthodon of Owen, that 

 massive batrachian, which leaves its hand-like footsteps in the 

 Xew Red Sandstone, and then is seen no more. Not for no- 

 thing is it that we start at the picture of that strange 

 impression, ghost of anticipated humanity, for apparently 

 it really is so. In these things the superficial thinker will 

 only see matter of ridicule : the large-hearted and truly 

 devout man, who puts nothing of nature away from him, 

 will, on the contrary, discover in them interesting traces of 

 the ways of God to man, and a deeper breathing of the 

 lesson, that whatever lives is to him kindred. 



Our view of the animal kingdom is now completed, and I 

 venture to claim for it the character of being, with all ne- 

 cessary and unavoidable imperfections, the only approach yet 

 made to a truly natural classification. Proceeding every- 

 where upon obvious affinities, most of them admitted by 

 zoologists, or else upon equally acknowledged facts in the 

 doctrine of embryology, it presents an arrangement in almost 

 every point conformable to palaeontology, or the geological 

 history of animals upon earth. Nay more ; so far is that his- 

 tory from being irreconcilable with any assumed progress of 

 animated being from simple to complex forms, that I would 

 now say, any discoveries violently altering it, or doing more 

 than filling up its blanks, would be at issue with the true plan 

 of being, and a source of doubt with regard to the whole of 

 our hypothesis of creation. 



It now appears that the animal kingdom (and by analogy 

 the vegetable also) is composed of series of forms, each usually 

 taking an origin in the lowest sub-kingdom, and afterwards 

 passing through higher grades, but not in every case through 

 all, until the highest is reached. It appears that the grand 

 matrix of organic being is the sea, that what may be called 

 trunk lines pass through this medium as high as the mam- 



