ce. The "heavy-gaited toad," satisfied with
sour ants, hard beetles, and such other fare as it can easily pick up,
and grown nasty in consequence, so that nothing seeks to eat it, has
hobbled through life, like a plethoric old gentleman, until the present
day, on its original feet. The more versatile and nimble-witted frog,
seeking better diet and greater security of life, went back to the
element in which it was bred, and, swimming much, became better fitted
for swimming. The soft elastic skin between the fingers or toes is just
the sort of tissue which responds most readily to inward impulses, and
we find that the very same change has come about in those birds and
beasts which live much in water. I know that this is not the accepted
theory of evolution, but I am waiting till it shall become so. We all
develop in the direction of our tendencies, and shall, I doubt not, be
wise enough some day to give animals leave to do the same.

It seems strange that any creature, furnished with such tricky and
adaptable instruments to go about the world with, should tire of them
and wish to get rid of them, but so it happened at a very early stage.
It must have been a consequence, I think, of growing too fast. Mark
Twain remarked about a dachshund that it seemed to want another pair of
legs in the middle to prevent it sagging. Now, some lizards are so long
that they cannot keep from sagging, and their progress becomes a painful
wriggle. But if you must go by wriggling, then what is the use of legs
to knock against stems and stones? So some lizards have discarded two of
their legs and some all four. Zoologically they are not snakes, but
snakes are only a further advance in the same direction. That snakes did
not start fair without legs is clear, for the python has to this day two
tell-tale leg-bones buried in its flesh.

When we pass from reptiles to birds, lo! an astounding thing has
happened. That there were flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know,
and there are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these are
simple mechanical alterations, which the imagination of a child, or a
savage, could explain.

The hands of a bat are hands still, and, though the fingers are hampered
by their awkward gloves, the thumbs are free. The giant fruit bats of
the tropics clamber about the trees quite acrobatically with their
thumbs and feet.

That Apollyonic monster of the prime, the pterodactyl, did even better.
Stretching on each littl