"
It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the
problem of Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete
proof of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of
Pteraspis, and that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace
of any vertebrate had been found there; only starfish,
shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites whose kindly descendants he had
often bathed with, as a child on the shores of Quincy Bay.
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of
them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him
perplexing; nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking
the sudden back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the
fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome
of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child. In
Siluria, he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the
horseshoe a Limulus , which helped nothing. Neither in the
Limulus nor in the Terebratula , nor in the Cestracion Philippi
,any more than in the Pteraspis, could one conceive an ancestor,
but, if one must, the choice mattered little. Cousinship had
limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the vertebrate
vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
ascent or descent to a lower type.
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