And if I had followed out all these various lines of classification fully, I should discover in the end that there was no animal, either recent or fossil, which did not at once fall into one or other of these sub-kingdoms.  In other words, every animal is organised upon one or other of the five, or more, plans, the existence of which renders our classification possible.  And so definitely and precisely marked is the structure of each animal, that, in the present state of our knowledge, there is not the least evidence to prove that a form, in the slightest degree transitional between any of the two groups Vertebrata, Annulosa, Mollusca, and Coelenterata, either exists, or has existed, during that period of the earth’s history which is recorded by the geologist.[1] Nevertheless, you must not for a moment suppose, because no such transitional forms are known, that the members of the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another.  On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all similar, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no essential structural respects, distinguishable.

[Footnote 1:  The different grouping necessitated by later knowledge does not affect the principle of the argument.—­1894.]

In this broad sense, it may with truth be said, that all living animals, and all those dead faunae which geology reveals, are bound together by an all-pervading unity of organisation, of the same character, though not equal in degree, to that which enables us to discern one and the same plan amidst the twenty different segments of a lobster’s body.  Truly it has been said, that to a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen.

Turning from these purely morphological considerations, let us now examine into the manner in which the attentive study of the lobster impels us into other lines of research.

Lobsters are found in all the European seas; but on the opposite shores of the Atlantic and in the seas of the southern hemisphere they do not exist.  They are, however, represented in these regions by very closely allied, but distinct forms—­the Homarus Americanus and the Homarus Capensis: so that we may say that the European has one species of Homuarus; the American, another; the African, another; and thus the remarkable facts of geographical distribution begin to dawn upon us.

Again, if we examine the contents of the earth’s crust, we shall find in the latter of those deposits, which have served as the great burying grounds of past ages, numberless lobster-like animals, but none so similar to our living lobster as to make zoologists sure that they belonged even to the same genus.  If we go still further back in time, we discover, in the oldest rocks of all, the remains of animals, constructed on the same general plan as the lobster, and belonging to the same great group of Crustacea; but for the most part totally different from the lobster, and indeed from any other living form of crustacean; and thus we gain a notion of that successive change of the animal population of the globe, in past ages, which is the most striking fact revealed by geology.