Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the tribe,* and the lemuridee into the suctorial, to which their length of muzzle and remarkable saltatory power are highly suitable. At the same time, the simiadz are degraded from the typical place, to which they have no sort of pretension, and placed where their mean character seems to require ; the cebide again being assigned that situation which their comparatively inoffensive dis- positions, their arboreal habits, and their extraor- dinary development of the tail, (which with them is like a fifth hand,) render so proper. The zoological status thus assigned to the human race is precisely what might be expected. In order to understand its full value, it is necessary to ob- serve how the various type peculiarities operate in fixing the character of the animals ranked in them. It is easy to conceive that they must be, in some instances, much mixed up with each other, and consequently obscured. If an animal, for example, is the suctorial member of a circle of species, « “It is probable that the pterodactyle had the power of swim- ming, which is so common in reptiles, and which is now pos- sessed by the pteropus pselaphon, or vampire bat, of the island of Benin.”—Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise. This is the more valuable as a testimony to the natatorial character of the vesper- tilionidee, that Dr. Buckland wrote without the least regard to, or perhaps knowledge of, the Macleay system.
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