Page:Colymbia (1873).djvu/110

104 "Many other circumstances," he continued, "I could adduce to prove to you the community of our origin with aquatic mammalia, but I fear to fatigue you. Thus, when a child is born into the air, it screams with pain and fright, in consequence of entering at once a medium unsuited to its nature. Now, when it is born in water, it shows none of these signs of distress, but continues tranquilly the same sort of existence it had in its mother. It is gradually and quietly taught to use its lungs, without that shock to its system which in air often proves fatal to its tender life. You have, in your own person, experienced the facility with which, when circumstances require it, the power of closing the nostrils by voluntary muscular action, as seals do, is acquired, proving that this is no new faculty, but simply the revival of one which had become obsolete from there being no occasion for it as long as you lived in air.

"In your own part of the world, some of the most ancient inhabitants are shown by their remains to have constructed their dwellings in large lakes. These people were, doubtless, the first in descent from the truly aquatic animal the human race sprang from, who, because they inhabited a region too cold to allow them to remain altogether in the water, still retained somewhat of the aquatic habits of their ancestor, and so lived an amphibious life, partly on the land and partly in the water.

"In short," he concluded, "it is obvious that man was never intended to pass his life in the air, where he is the inferior of almost all those he is pleased to call the lower animals. The water is his proper element, and there alone can he assert and prove his superiority to the brute creation, and develop in