evidently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride of only
about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail instead of a cane. He
was probably taking a stroll upon the shores of that vast
Mediterranean Sea that occupied all the interior of the continent
when he crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning--how many
million years ago?--as we know from the imprint of the raindrops
upon the mud. Probably the shower did not cause him to quicken his
pace, as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his immediate
forbears were like, or what the forms were that connected him with
the fishes, we shall probably never know. Doubtless the great book
of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if we are ever lucky
enough to open it at the right place. How many other secrets, that
evolutionists would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves
hold!

It is something to me to know that it rained that day when our
amphibian ancestor ventured out. The weather was beginning to get
organized also, and settling down to business. It had got beyond the
state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier ages, and the
raindrops were playing their parts. Yet, from all the evidence we
have, we infer that the climate was warm and very humid, like that
of a greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns and rushes
and lycopods, was very rank, but there was no grass, or moss, no
deciduous trees, or flowers, or fruit, as we know these things.

A German anatomist says that we have the vestiges of one hundred and
eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,--now
useless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix.
Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from the
fishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a