20 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



never from the apex. The amphibians arose from primitive 

 ancestral fishes and not from such highly specialised fishes as 

 are common at the present day. In the same way the reptiles 

 arose from primitive amphibia and the birds and mammals 

 from primitive reptiles. 



Professor Wood Jones will lectiire to us on the origin of 

 man and I think he will agree with me that man himself arose 

 from some primitive, unspecialised marmnalian stock. Indeed, 

 in his bodily organisation, man still shows many very primitive 

 features, and it is only by virtue of his remarkable brain 

 development that he has been enabled to claim precedence 

 over all the lower animals. 



Now the past history of the animal kingdom demonstrates 

 very clearly that over-specialisation in any direction leads, 

 sooner or later, to destruction, and then the running is taken 

 up, so to speak, by some less specialised offshoot of the 

 dominant branch. 



Those sinister monsters of the past, the gigantic reptiles 

 which flomished during the secondary period of the earth's 

 history, exhausted their potentialities in the development of 

 brute strength and bodily armour ■ on an enormous scale, 

 together with the huge motor mechanism of bone and muscle 

 necessitated thereby. At the same time their brains were of 

 quite insignificant dimensions, in some cases no thicker than 

 the spinal cord. We have recently been asked, in a sensa- 

 tional advertisement issued in response to a request from the 

 chairman of the War Savings Committee, " How did man 

 conquer the Dinosaurus ? " The question, of course, is an 

 absurd one, for the last dinosaur had become extinct many 

 milKons of years before the advent of man. The dinosaurs 

 succumbed to their excessive development of pure brutish- 

 ness, unleavened by any gleam of intelligence. Man, on the 

 other hand, thinks to find salvation in his brain-power. But 

 are we not, at the present moment, doing exactly the same 

 thing as the dinosaurs and other failures of the past, only con- 

 sciously and with our eyes open ? It is true we no longer 

 depend exclusively upon our own bodily organisation for our 

 machinery of warfare. Our highly developed intelUgence 



