324 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



ly diagnosed by an extension of the abdominal or caudai 

 region, or by a conversion of some of the parts about the 

 head to uses which serve the vegetative rather than the 

 animal functions. Thus the elongated serpent is inferior 

 to the abbreviated turtle ; and, in another class, the elon- 

 gated lobster ranks below the shortened crab. 



In each class forms may be selected as ordinal types. In 

 the class of mammals we have man, the monkey, the bat, the 

 lion, the deer, the hippopotamus, and the ivhale, as the ex- 

 pression of so many different ideas in a graduated series. 

 In another class we have crabs, lobsters, trilobites, lemeans, 

 and 10 heel-animalcules as a portion of a graduated series of 

 forms expressed under the articulated type. The orders 

 of each class may be regarded as the embodiments of a se- 

 ries of divine conceptions. They constitute a distinct suc- 

 cession of ideas recognizable in a fixed order as the mind 

 glances over the series of organic beings. 



Turn now to those wonderful and mysterious evolutions 

 through which every animal goes in passing from the con- 

 dition of an egg to that of an adult being. We find here 

 expressed the same successions of ideas as in the grada- 

 tions of adult animals. I have said that aquatic forms 

 stand below terrestrial — the aquatic fishes below the ter- 

 restrial reptiles. Now the fish-like tadpole is the embry- 

 onic condition of the frog, the toad, and the salamander. 

 In the development-history of these animals, then, the idea 

 of a swimmer and a water-breather is antecedent to that 

 of a land-dweller and air-breather, just as the fish and the 

 whale come before the air-breathing mammal in the ascend- 

 ing grades of being. But what is most astonishing is the 

 fact that all vertebrates, even man himself, exhibit at one 

 stage of their existence a structural adaptation for the low 

 and fish-like mode of respiration, and by degrees assume 

 the characteristics of higher and higher orders till their 



