same great class.

RUDIMENTARY, ATROPHIED, AND ABORTED ORGANS.

Organs or parts in this strange condition, bearing the plain stamp of
inutility, are extremely common, or even general, throughout nature. It
would be impossible to name one of the higher animals in which some
part or other is not in a rudimentary condition. In the mammalia, for
instance, the males possess rudimentary mammae; in snakes one lobe of
the lungs is rudimentary; in birds the "bastard-wing" may safely be
considered as a rudimentary digit, and in some species the whole wing is
so far rudimentary that it cannot be used for flight. What can be more
curious than the presence of teeth in foetal whales, which when grown up
have not a tooth in their heads; or the teeth, which never cut through
the gums, in the upper jaws of unborn calves?

Rudimentary organs plainly declare their origin and meaning in various
ways. There are beetles belonging to closely allied species, or even
to the same identical species, which have either full-sized and perfect
wings, or mere rudiments of membrane, which not rarely lie under
wing-covers firmly soldered together; and in these cases it is
impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary
organs sometimes retain their potentiality: this occasionally occurs
with the mammae of male mammals, which have been known to become well
developed and to secrete milk. So again in the udders of the genus Bos,
there are normally four developed and two rudimentary teats; but the
latter in our domestic cows sometimes become well developed and yield
milk. In regard to plants, the petals are sometimes rudimentary, and
sometimes well developed in the individuals of the same species. In
certain plants having separated sexes Kolreuter found that by crossing a
species, in which the male flowers included a rudiment of a pistil, with
an hermaphrodite species, having of course a well-developed pistil, the
rudiment in the hybrid offspring was much increased in size; and this
clearly shows that the rudimentary and perfect pistils are essentially
alike in nature. An animal may possess various parts in a perfect state,
and yet they may in one sense be rudimentary, for they are useless: thus
the tadpole of the common salamander or water-newt, as Mr. G.H. Lewes
remarks, "has gills, and passes its existence in the water; but the
Salamandra atra, which lives high up among the mountains, brings forth
its young full-formed. This animal