Now, it is a striking fact that the ancient fishes at the time when the amphibians appeared had not reached the teleostean stage. The ganoids and elasmobranchs swarmed in the waters of the Devonian and Carboniferous times. Dipnoans and marsipobranchs were there, too, in all probability, but teleosteans do not appear until the Mesozoic period. The very kinds of fish, then, which swarmed in the seas at that time, and were the predominant race before the Carboniferous epoch, are those to which the amphibians at their first appearance show the closest affinity. Here, again, the same law appears; from the predominant race at the time, the next higher race arose, and arose by a most striking modification, which was the consequence of altering the medium in which it lived. By coming out of the water and living on the land, or, rather, being able to live partly on land and partly in the water, by the acquisition of air-breathing respiratory organs or lungs in addition to, and instead of, water-breathing organs or gills, the amphibian not only arose from the fish, but made an entirely new departure in the sequence of progressive forms. This was a most momentous step in the history of evolution--one fraught with mighty consequences and full of most important suggestions. From this time onwards the struggle for existence by which upward progress ensued took place on the land, not in the sea, and, as has been pointed out, led to the evolution of reptiles from amphibians, birds and quadrupedal mammals from reptiles, and man from quadrupeds. In the sea the fishes were left to multiply and struggle among themselves, their only opponents being the giant cephalopods, which themselves had been evolved from a continual succession of the Mollusca. For this reason the struggle for existence between the fishes and the higher race evolved from them did not {24}take place until some members of that higher race took again to the water, and so competed with the fish-tribe in their own element.