The Kingdom of ManLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
The Kingdom of Man
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
African trypanosomiasis; Human beings; Science -- History
The Freshwater Jelly-fish of Lake Tanganyika (_Limnocnida
Tanganyicae_), magnified five times linear. Since its discovery
in Tanganyika it has been found also in the Lake Victoria Nyanza
and in pools in the Upper Niger basin.]
[Illustration: FIG. 17.
The Giraffe-like animal called the Okapi, discovered by Sir Harry
Johnston in the Congo Forest. Photograph of the skin of a female
sent home by him in 1901, and now mounted and exhibited in the
Natural History Museum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.
Two “bandoliers” cut by the natives from the striped part of
the skin (the haunches) and at first supposed to be bits of the
hide of a new kind of Zebra. These were sent home by Sir Harry
Johnston in 1900.]
The main result of a good deal of such investigation is measured by
our increased knowledge of the pedigree of organisms, what used to
be called ‘classification.’ The anatomical study by the Australian
professors, Hill and Wilson, of the teeth and the fœtus of the
Australian group of pouched mammals--the marsupials--has entirely
upset previous notions, to the effect that these are a primitive
group, and has shown that their possession of only one replacing
tooth is a retention of one out of many such teeth (the germs of
which are present), as in placental mammals; and further that many of
these marsupials have the nourishing outgrowth of the fœtus called
the placenta fairly well developed, so that they must be regarded
as a degenerate side-branch of the placental mammals, and not as
primitive forerunners of that dominant series.
[Illustration: FIG. 19.
Photograph of the skull of a male Okapi--showing the paired boney
horn-cores--similar to those of the Giraffe, but connected with
the frontal bones and not with the parietals as the horn-cores of
Giraffes are.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20.
Drawings by Professor Grassi, of Rome, of the young of the common
Eel and its metamorphosis. All of the natural size. The uppermost
figure represents a transparent glass-like creature--which was
known as a rare “find” to marine naturalists, and received the
name _Leptocephalus_. Really it lives in vast numbers in great
depths of the sea--five hundred fathoms and more. It is hatched
here from the eggs of the common Eel which descends from the
ponds, lakes, and rivers of Europe in order to breed in these
great depths. The gradual change of the _Leptocephalus_ into a
young Eel or “Elver” is shown, and was discovered by Grassi. The
young Eels leave the great depth of the ocean and ascend the
rivers in immense shoals of many hundred thousand individuals,
and wriggle their way up banks and rocks into the small streams
and pools of the continent.
The above figures were published by Professor Grassi in November
1896, in the _Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_, edited
by E. Ray Lankester and published by Churchill & Sons.]
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