In the Dipneusts the head is not marked off from the trunk. The skin is covered with large scales. The skeleton is soft, cartilaginous, and at a low stage of development, as in the lower Selachii and the earliest Ganoids. The chorda is completely retained, and surrounded by an unsegmented sheath. The two pairs of limbs are very simple fins of a primitive type, like those of the lowest Selachii. The formation of the brain, the gut, and the sexual organs is also the same as in the Selachii. Thus the Dipneusts have preserved by heredity many of the less advanced features of our primitive fish-like ancestors, and at the same time have made a great step forward in adaptation to air-breathing by means of lungs and the correlative improvement of the heart. Ceratodus is particularly interesting on account of the primitive build of its skeleton; the cartilaginous skeleton of its two pairs of fins, for instance, has still the original form of a bi-serial or feathered leaf, and was on that account described by Gegenbaur as a "primitive fin-skeleton." On the other hand, the skeleton of the pairs of fins is greatly reduced in the African dipneust (Protopterus) and the American (Lepidosiren). Further, the lungs are double in these modern dipneusts, as in all the other air-breathing vertebrates; they have on that account been called "double-lunged" (Dipneumones) in contrast to the Ceratodus; the latter has only a single lung (Monopneumones). At the same time the gills also are developed as water-breathing organs in all these lung-fishes. Protopterus has external as well as internal gills. The paleozoic Dipneusts that are in the direct line of our ancestry, and form the connecting-bridge between the Ganoids and the Amphibia, differ in many respects from their living descendants, but agree with them in the above essential features. This is confirmed by a number of interesting facts that have lately come to our knowledge in connection with the embryonic development of the Ceratodus and Lepidosiren; they give us important information as to the stem-history of the lower Vertebrates, and therefore of our early ancestors of the paleozoic age. CHAPTER 2.22. OUR FIVE-TOED ANCESTORS.