The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

Yet though the world might have been full of these creatures, they would not have been able to make the fullest use of it, for all animal life would have been comparatively insignificant and feeble, each creature moving within a very narrow range, and having but small powers of enjoyment or activity. With the exception of the insects, by far the greater number would, during their whole lives, never wander more than a few yards from one spot, while, though the locust and the butterfly make long journeys, yet the bees and beetles, dragon-flies and ants, would not cross many miles of ground in several generations.

What a curious world that would have been in which the stag-beetle and the atlas-moth could boast of being the largest land animals, except where perhaps some monster land snail might bear them company; while cuttle-fish and calamaries would have been the rulers of the sea, and the crabs and lobsters of the shores! A strangely silent world too. The grasshopper’s chirp as he rubbed his wings together, the hum of the bee, the click of the sharp jaws of the grub of the stag-beetle, eating away the trunk of some old oak tree, would have been among the loudest sounds to be heard; and though there would have been plenty of marvellous beauty among the metallic-winged beetles, the butterflies, and the delicate forms of the sea, yet amid all this lovely life we should seek in vain for any intelligent faces,—for what expression could there be in the fixed and many-windowed eye of the ant or beetle, or in the stony face of the crab?

These lower forms, however, were not destined to have all the world to themselves, for in ages, so long ago that we cannot reckon them, another division of Life’s children had begun to exist which possessed advantages giving it the power to press forward far beyond the star-fish, the octopus, or the insect. This was the Backboned division, to which belong the fish of our seas and rivers; the frogs and toads, snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and tortoises; the birds of all kinds and sizes; the kangaroos; the rats, pigs, elephants, lions, whales, seals, and monkeys.

Is it possible, then, that all these widely different creatures, which are fitted to live not only in all parts of the land, but also in the air above, and the seas and rivers below, and which are, in fact, all those popularly known as “animals,” only form one division out of seven in the real animal kingdom?

Can it be true that while the chalk-builders have one division all to themselves, the sponges forming a transition group, the lasso-throwers another division, the prickly-skinned animals a third, the mollusca a fourth, the worms a fifth, and the insects a sixth, yet the innumerable kinds of birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes, are all sufficiently alike to be included in one single division—the seventh? It seems at first as if this arrangement must be unequal and unnatural; but let us go back for a moment to the beginning, and we shall see that it is not only true, but that quite a new interest attaches to the higher animals when we learn how wonderfully life has built up so many different forms upon one simple plan.

Starting, then, with the first glimmerings of life, we find the minute lime and flint builders, without any parts, making the utmost of their little lives, filling the depths of the sea, and wandering in pools and puddles on the land; acting, in fact, as scavengers for such matter as is left them by other animals. But here their power ends; to take a higher stand in life a more complicated creature is needed, and the sponge-animal, with its two kinds of cells and its numerous eggs, is the next step leading on to the curious division of lasso-throwers. These, in their turn, do their utmost to spread and vary in a hundred different ways. Possessed of a good stomach, of nerves, muscles, powerful weapons, and means for producing eggs and young ones, they fill the waters as hydras, sea-firs, jelly-fish, anemones, and corals. But here they too find their limit, and, without advancing any farther, continue to flourish in their lowly fashion. Meanwhile the tide of life is flowing on in two other channels, striving ever onwards and upwards. On the one hand, the walking star-fish and sea-urchin push forward into active life under the sea, forming, with their relations, a strange and motley group, but one which could scarcely be moulded into higher and more intelligent beings. On the other hand, the oyster and his comrades, with their curious mantle-working secret protect their soft body within by a shelly covering, and by degrees we arrive at the large army of mollusca, headed by the intelligent cuttle-fish. And here this division too ceases to advance. The soft body in its shelly home does not lend itself to wide and great changes, and it was left for other channels to carry farther the swelling tide of life. These take their rise in the lowly, insignificant division of the worms, which may, perhaps, have had something to do with the earliest forms even of the star-fish and mollusca, but which soon shot upwards, on the one hand along a line of its own, while, on the other, we have seen[3] how, in its many-ringed segments, each bearing its leg-like bristles and its line of nerve-telegraph, the worm foreshadowed the insects and crustacea, or the jointed-footed animals of sea and land, forming the sixth division.

Here surely at last we must have reached animals which will answer any purposes life can wish to fulfil. We find among them numberless different forms, spreading far and wide through the water and over the land, and it would seem as if the sturdy crab and fighting lobster need fear no rival in the sea, while the intelligent bee and ant were equal to any emergency on dry ground. But here the tide of life met with another check. It must be remembered that the jointed-footed animals, whether belonging to land or water, carry their solid part or skeleton outside them; their body itself is soft, and cased in armour which has to be cast off and formed afresh from time to time as they grow. For this reason they are like men in armour, heavily weighted as soon as they grow to any size, while the body within cannot become so firmly and well knit together as if all the parts, hard and soft, were able to grow and enlarge in common. And so we find that large-sized armour-covered animals, such as gigantic crabs and lobsters, are lumbering unwieldy creatures, in spite of their strength, while the nimble intelligent insects, such as the ant and bee, are comparatively small and delicate.

It would be curious to try and guess what might have happened if the ant could have grown as large as man, and built houses and cities, and wandered over wide spaces instead of being restricted to her ant-hills for a home, and few acres for her kingdom; but she too has found the limit of her powers in the impossibility of becoming a large and powerful creature. Thus it remained for Life to find yet another channel to reach its highest point, by devising a plan of structure in which the solid skeleton should be—not a burden for the soft body to carry, as in the sea-urchins, snails, insects, and crabs—but an actual support to the whole creature, growing with it and forming a framework for all its different parts.

This plan is that of the backboned animals. They alone, of all Life’s children, have a skeleton within their bodies embedded in the muscular flesh, and formed, not of mere hardened, dead matter, but of bones which have blood-vessels and nerves running through them, so that they grow as the body grows, and strengthen with its strength. This is a very different thing from a mere outer casing round a soft body, for it is clear that an animal with a living growing skeleton can go on increasing in size and strength, and its framework will grow with the limbs in any direction most useful to it.

Here, then, we have one of the secrets why the backboned animals have been able to press forward and vary in so many different ways; and especially useful to them has been that gristly cord stretching along the back, which by degrees has become hardened and jointed, so as to form that wonderful piece of mechanism, the backbone.