But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least
amused - if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals
represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races,
which of your organs is represented by that "sca'd man's head,"
which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence
to plain likeness, call "mermaid's head," (12) which we picked up
just now on Paignton Sands? Or which, again, by its more beautiful
little congener, (13) five or six of which are adhering tightly to
the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate spines of lilac
and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead
sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols? One cannot say that in
him we have the first type of the human skull: for the
resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in
the logical use of that term,) and not homological, I.E. a lower
manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say,
that this was Nature's first and lowest attempt at that use of
hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which
she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of
vertebrate animals! But even that conceit, pretty as it sounds,
will not hold good; for though Radiates similar to these were among
the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as their time,
perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the
sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller's pets the old red sandstone fishes,
that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which this is a mere
mockery. (14) Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary
feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is
enclosed within an ever-growing limestone castle, to the
architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are
bungling heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet