1. _Whence the animal kingdom?_ This stage in the scale of life, the advance from vegetable to the animal kingdom, is, to quote Mr. Wallace, again "completely beyond all possibility of explanation by _matter,_ its laws and forces. It is the introduction of _sensation or consciousness,_ constituting the fundamental distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms." Plants live, animals live _and feel;_ and they have consciousness. At this point again, only a thorough-going materialist will deny the working of an outside power, a power not resident in matter, but altering and molding matter from without and endowing it with new abilities. Only an act of this Power Without could endow living substance with feeling and consciousness. No one can here any longer appeal to that undefined chemico-electric action by which some attempt to account for protoplasm. Mr. Wallace says: "Here all idea of mere complication of structure producing the result is out of the question. We feel it to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a certain stage of complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary result of that complexity alone, an _ego_ should start into existence,--a thing that _feels,_ that is _conscious_ of its own existence. Here we have the certainty that something new has arisen,--a being whose nascent consciousness has gone on increasing in power and definiteness till it has culminated in the higher animals. No verbal explanation or attempt at explanation--such as the statement that life is 'the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm,' or that the whole existing organic universe from the amoeba up to man was latent in the fire-mist from which the solar system was developed--can afford any mental satisfaction, or help us in any way to a solution of the mystery." 2. _Whence the backbone?_ All animals are divided into vertebrates and invertebrates, the animals with a backbone and animals without. Between these two groups the barrier of backbone stands impassable till it is explained how a butterfly could become a bird, or a snail a serpent, or a star fish acquire the skeleton of the shark. These two groups, the vertebrate animals and the invertebrate, must be regarded as fundamentally distinct. 3. _Whence the breast?_ Vertebrates are either mammals or submammals. The breastless tribes are brids, [tr. note: sic] reptiles, and fishes. These are far beneath in the scale, while the mammal, by its peculiar endowment in that it gives suck to its young, stands elect, aloft, and apart. Till it is shown how an animal that never got milk from its mother stumbled on the capacity of giving what was never given it, _the breast_ will stand, against all dreams of development, companion-barrier to the backbone. Nor is there an animal that can be regarded as a connecting link between these two master groups.