Identifier: natureneighborse05bant (find matches)
Title: www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/tags/book...
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Banta, Nathaniel Moore, 1867- Schneider, Albert, 1863- Higley, William Kerr, 1860-1908 Abbott, Gerard Alan
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: Chicago, American Audobon association
Contributing Library: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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ct reference to his business in life. The backboned animals are the highest of all the animalkingdom. That is, in general they can do more things,they have a greater variety of relations to the things aroundthem, and they are more definitely fitted for a high position.Some of them are not verj^ high nor Aery intelligent, evenas compared with their lower brethren, the insects. Theant is a tiny creature, with no skull and no backbone, andcannot do any very big thing; but she is a very wise beastby the side of a carp or a herring. Still, on the whole, thebackboned animals are the highest, and as you and I bothbelong to that class, we could never afford to confess to anydoubts as to their superiority. But we are the highest of the type — that is, we men —and the rest of the tribe are all lower. And the lowest ofall backboned animals we call fishes. And we shall know afish when we see one, because the hard parts or skeleton areon the inside, and he stays in the water, breathing the air
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K>2 THE FISH TRIBE 65 which is dissolved in it, and he has never any toes or clawsor feathers. Pie breathes with gills and he swims with fins.He has no hair or feathers on his body, and when he hasany cover on liis skin at all, it takes the shape of scales. Afish is a water backboned animal. A backboned animal iscalled a vertebrate. A fish is therefore a water-vertebrate. There were fishes before there were any other kind ofvertebrates. They have been on the earth longer than birdsor beasts or reptiles. They came first, and we have goodreason to believe that the fishes are the ancestors of all theothers. But when the forefathers of tlie land animals foundmeans of keeping alive on the land, so many new oppor-tunities opened out to them, and they found so much varietyin their surroundings, that the) throve and spread amaz-ingly. And there came to be many kinds of them, of manyforms, while the rest of the tribe kept in the water andstayed fishes. And there was always a host of these,

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