ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 21 



impenetrable and typically unjointed armor/ With tliem 

 is to be grouped the vast army of brachiopods which 

 thronged the early seas of the earth, a group whose or- 

 ganic station has been much debated, whose historic posi- 

 tion and anatomy separate them too widely from the mol- 

 lusks to justify speculations as to their degeneration or 

 derivation from that stock. 



This form of protective covering represents almost the 

 extreme of defensive personal armor; a complete adjust- 

 ment accompanied by, or resulting in, a stabilized inheri- 

 tance. All groups of the MoUusca have not permitted this 

 development to go to so great an extreme as in the lamelli- 

 branchs, or clams, for the snail and the nautilus travel about 

 carrying their coiled shells with them, quick to withdraw 

 into them whenever danger comes and often to close the 

 door behind with a shelly plate or hardened skin. Squids 

 and cuttlefish, late representatives of the nautilus stock, 

 have followed a divergent path in this development by 

 which their outer shell has been enfolded within the body 

 substance. These creatures, too, maintain an active mo- 

 bility, flying like darts through the ocean waters. Ptero- 

 pods, a very ancient and active molluscan type, and the 

 translucent scaphopods are the surface swimmers of the 

 deep seas. Both carry light external shells and all these 

 together seem to portray the result of long struggle against 

 the general enchainment of their class and to typify in a 

 measure what the Mollusca might all have been had not 

 subjection of close encasement been sought or thrust upon 

 them. Among them all, the most palpable change, progress 

 and variation of expression are within the active groups. 



A very much less seclusive body-cover was developed by 

 the great group of articulated animals, the Arthropods, 

 represented by the shrimps, crabs, lobsters and insects. In 



1 Except chiton and such multivalvular mollusks, whose articulated shell ap- 

 pears to be a response to the coiling habit which the animal had in much the 

 same degree as the trilobite and the sow bug. 



