3178 TuHE ZooLocist—Aveust, 1872. 
sea? Do they advance one jot or one tittle the hypothesis thou 
hast propounded, that man was not created but evolved from an 
ascidian?” 
This great question, combined with another, Whether our 
tendency is progressive or retrogressive, has been handled with 
greater skill by a third writer, with whose name I am unacquainted, 
and I wish particularly to invite attention to the concluding 
paragraph of the passage I am about to cite. We have throughout 
only to substitute the word “ascidian” for the word “ frog,” and 
we shall find the present discussion was anticipated seven thousand 
years ago without being brought to any definite or satisfactory 
conclusion. 
“Pardon me,” answered Aph Lin; “in what we call the 
Wrangling or Philosophical Period of History, which was at its 
height about seven thousand years ago, there was a very dis- 
tinguished naturalist, who proved to the satisfaction of numerous 
disciples, such analogical and anatomical agreements between an 
An [man] and a frog as to show that out of one must have been 
developed the other. They had some diseases in common; they 
were both subject to the same parasitic worms in the intestines ; 
and, strange to say, the An has in his structure a swimming bladder, 
no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment that clearly 
proves his descent from a frog. Nor is there any argument against 
this theory to be found in the relative difference in size, for there 
are still existent in our world frogs of a size and stature not inferior 
to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have been 
still larger.” —‘ Coming Race, p. 138. 
“In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage asserted 
another was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim of that 
age, that the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being 
tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and 
therefore another sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that 
the An was not the descendant of the frog, but that the frog was 
clearly the improved development of an An. The shape of the frog, 
taken generally, was much more symmetrical than that of an An; 
besides the beautiful conformation of its lower limbs, its flanks and 
shoulders, the majority of the Ana [men] of that day were almost 
deformed and certainly ill-shaped. Again, the frog had the power 
to live alike on land or in water—a mighty privilege partaking of a 
spiritual essence denied to an An, since the disuse of his swimming 
