ARMOUR-PLATING AND SKIN PICTURES i6i 



My object in all this discussion has been to endeavour to 

 discover why the Tiger and Zebra are striped, why the Jaguar and 

 the Leopard are rosetted, and the Deer and Horse dappled, and why 

 there are so many animals of different classes which have ringed 

 tails. The skeletons of all these animals inform us that they are 

 all related structurally, and therefore they must have come from 

 some common ancestral source, if not from the same pair of 

 parents, certainly from the same class of parents. 



In another place I have shown that the same pattern of armour- 

 plates can be traced, through the Crocodile to the Sturgeon, and 

 perhaps also much lower down in the scale of life. 



Professor Huxley ^ says : ' If the doctrine of evolution be true, 

 it follows that, however diverse the different groups of animals and 

 of plants may be, they must all, at one time or other, have been 

 connected by gradational forms ; so that, from the highest animals, 

 whatever they may be, down to the lowest speck of protoplasmic 

 matter in which life can be manifested, a series of gradations 

 leading from one end of the series to the other, either exists, or 

 has existed.' 



Professor Alleyne Nicholson in his Swiney Lectures of 1893 

 repeated the same thing. He told us that all forms of life on this 

 earth origihated from pelagic low forms like those still in existence 

 in the oceans. 



But what is there to show that in the picture-plating of the 

 Jaguar the enclosed space is homologous with the larger middle 

 bone-plates of the Sturgeon, the Crocodile, the Glyptodon, etc. ? 

 There is nothing to show this beyond the difference in colour of the 

 enclosed space in the Jaguar rosettes as compared with the general 

 ground colour of the animal's skin. I have endeavoured to empha- 

 sise this difference of colour in No. 9, Fig. 59. The shaded space 

 ' ' Science and Hebrew Tradition ' — Lectures on Evolution, p. 89. 



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