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Show 234 EXPLANATIONS ascending grades of the animal kingdom. W~th respect. then to what follows-'' The sentence on wh1ch we here com:Uent contain~ three distinct propositions, and all three are false to nature and no better than a dr~am,"- I believe I may safely le'ave the reader to say 'Yhich party is the falsifier and the dreamer. He goes on 1n the samt! strain-" It is true that the next step gives us fishes; but it is not true that the earliest fishes link on to the radiata: this is l' grand and, at the present day, an unp~rdonab.le blunder." This is another dream of the revtewer, for certainly such an affinity was .not suggested in any editio_n of the Vestirres hitherto published. In the first four editions which alone were under his notice, no passage except from the articulata was even hinted at. So much as a proof of the reviewer's recklessness in . mak~ng char(Tes · there is no need, however, to affirm, wtth htm, that~ c~nnection between certain high radiates and sot?-e of the lowest fishes does not exist. I venture to predtct that affinities of an equally startling nature wil.l yet be made familiar to naturalists. Meanwhile, it is enough to show that this c~nfident critic has raised an accusation for which he has not a shadow of ground. Taking up the sp.ecial fo~sils of the Permian system, he says, "The earliest rephles are not of such a structure as to link themselves, on a natural scale, to the noble sauroids of the preceding carbonife~·ous ep.och." The.Y are not the marine saurians, or fish ltzards (1cht~Y:osaun) which occur in a hi(l'her formation, but lacertLhans, ot animals of lizard-like 0 character. Now what fi~·st stril~es me here is the extrJ.ordinary narrowness of a mtnd 'vht.ch sees nothint}' indicative of natural procedure, no htnt toward" gt·e~t generJ.liz;tio~s, in ~he simple fact of r~ptiles followin<T upon hsh 1n th1s grahd march of l1fe throurrh the morntn · time of the \1\0rld. He knows tl:at, in every cla"'"ificati~n of the ani~a~ kingd?r?, rept1l~s ran\ .. n xt above fi ·h, that in some hvtng famtlles there ts such a cornrention and intermixture of both characte·1~, that naturalist~ cannot a~ree to which class t~ey should be a. i·rn <l. Ill: actually see , in a general ''te.w. of the earlier r ptiliferou formation , an~n1als combuung the fi~h ~nd r plile in the tno 'l une<lUl~ocal T?anner .. ~e· spi incr, how.~~ .r, th.c gr t fact wluch. s.~mes thiollvt thC'4l~ ob. cnl'lhl th1~ per c.n, and I ~u11sonyto~dd,ge.o ~gi:Jl g nerally, can only · c1stcn upon sueh part.1culara a! EARLIES'r REPTILES. 235 may be 1nade out to be difficulties in the way of generalization. Passing to the particulars, a few land lacertilian9 come first, where a::; the first, according to my hypothesis, ought to be marine forms, and linked to fish. He says of this difficulty, that I have stated it feebly. Perhaps it would have been well for his own credit that he had stated it somewhat less confidently; for before his sheets had seen the light, a prospect had arisen of his affirmations on this point being thoroughly falsified. In Silliman's Journal, for April, 1845, is an account of sandstone surfaces pretty far down in the Oarbonifero'lts formation of Pennsylvania, marked with the vestiges of terrestrial animals. Setting aside, in the meantime, one class of these markings, which are said to indicate wading birds, \Ve have a variety of others plainly denoting REPTILES. In one group, the foot consists of a ball, w1th five toes radiating from it in front. In another, the impression resembles that made by a .coarse human hand, with the rudiment of a sixth toe at the outside. The reptilian families indicated by these foot-marks have not yet been pronounced upon, as far as I am aware; but from the extreme resemolance of some of them to the vestiged of the labyrinthidon, there can hardly be a doubt that some of the order batrachia are amongst them. If they prove wholly ba~rachian, as is not unlikely, for we have living families with feet resembling the first group of vestiges, or even if only a portion of the1n be certified as of thi~ ordet, where will be the lacertilians, and where th~ confident counter-assertions of the Edinburgh reviewer? The batrachia he has himself allowed to be a low order of reptiles (p. 51.) They are so considered by all naturalists. Might I not here, then, take my stand upon the fact of animals, the lowest apparently of the reptile order, being now found at the earliest point of time? I might unquestionably do so with a decided immediate advantage to my hypothesis. It 'vould in a great measure neutralize the whole of the objections of the reviewer with regard tu the chronology of the reptiles. But I am, whatever he may think of me, willing to read the book of nature aright. I receive the fact as one liable any day to receive a new 9-spect from fresh discoveries. In as far as it is so, it only teaches that we are not to be too confident in drawing inferenc_ f(s either for or against the theory of development from the particular succession in which the orders of the • |