Building Apparatus of M. ringens. By F. A. Bedioell. 223 
choose its material, keep up five, nay six separate and distinct 
currents, all necessary to its object, never let them get confused, 
though there is not the one-hundredth part of an inch between 
either of them, and go on eating all the time, I confess utterly 
seems to me to confound the power of the imagination ; you want 
not merely a pellet organ, that is nothing, you want a set of setae 
at the back of the head, and a pair of hooks on each side of them, 
a movable nose to pinch the brick against the chin and lay it 
on the wall, the cushion to direct, and an apparatus to guide the 
materials, a cleft in each side of the pellet organ to conduct them, 
and the intelligence (or say improved “ vital force ”) to use 
all the apparatus when you have got it, and make it work as 
one machine. Even with Limnias to help me, still the last form 
of apparatus I should have dreamt of reaching would have been 
such a one as that before us. As to whether it can be reached by 
degradation I know not, but I confess myself unable to see how it 
is possible to evolve it out of anything less advanced in organiza- 
tion than itself, at any rate by any process which does not end in 
first creating and then dropping out a score of intermediate non- 
existent forms just at the very point where we most want their 
presence and have a right to expect their existence, and where the 
actual survival of so many, and the extremely favourable and 
established conditions under which the development has been going 
on fully entitle us to require the non-existence of the others to be 
strictly accounted for.* 
* I have added in FI. CXCVII., A, a portrait of this beautiful animal; those 
by Mr. Gosse, Mr. Slack and others, and even that by Mr. Cubitt, by no means 
exhibit it in its best attitude. 
