among the animals,—a fact of which no one can be more thoroughly aware than the author of the “Vestiges” himself. Of this let me adduce a striking instance, of which I shall make further use anon. “All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea; none from the continent. Man also is a child of the warm and shallow parts of the sea in the neighborhood of the land.” Such also was the hypothesis of Lamarck and Maillet. In following up the view of his masters, the author of the “Vestiges” fixes on the _Delphinidæ_ as the sea-inhabiting progenitors of the simial family, and, through the simial family, of man For that highest order of the mammalia to which the _Simiadæ_ (monkeys) belong, “there remains,” he says, “a basis in the _Delphinidæ_, the last and smallest of the cetacean tribes. This affiliation has a special support in the brain of the dolphin family, which is distinctly allowed to be, in proportion to general bulk, the greatest among mammalia next to the orang-outang and man. We learn from Tiedemann, that each of the cerebral hemispheres is composed, as in man and the monkey tribe, of three lobes,—an anterior, a middle, and a posterior; and these hemispheres present much more numerous circumvolutions and grooves than those of any other animal. Here it might be rash to found any thing upon the ancient accounts of the dolphin,—its familiarity with man, and its helping him in shipwreck and various marine disasters; although it is difficult to believe these stories to be altogether without some basis in fact. There is no doubt, however, that the dolphin evinces a predilection for human society, and charms the mariner by the gambols which it performs beside his vessel.”