Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/552

546 very large yolk-sac (or which are admittedly derived from such forms). Now wherever we have a large yolk-sac we have developed on its surface a rich network of blood vessels for purposes of nutrition. But such a network must necessarily act as an extraordinarily efficient organ of respiration, and did we not know the facts we might venture to prophesy that in forms possessing it any other small skin organ of respiration would tend to disappear.

"No doubt these external gills are absent also in a few of the admittedly primitive forms such as, e. g., (neo-) Ceratodus. But I would ask that in this connection one should bear in mind one of the marked characteristics of external gills—their great regenerative power. This involves their being extremely liable to injury and consequently a source of danger to their possessor. Their absence, therefore, in certain cases may well have been due to natural selection. On the other hand, the presence in so many lowly forms of these organs, the general close similarity in structure that runs through them in different forms and the exact correspondence in their position and relations to the body can, it seems to me, only be adequately explained by looking on them as being homologous structures inherited from a common ancestor and consequently of great antiquity in the vertebrate stem."

As to the third theory, Professor Kerr suggests tentatively that the external gill, as developed in salamanders and in the young Lepidosiren, may be the structure modified to form the paired limbs. Of the homology of fore and hind limbs and consequently of their like origin there can be no doubt.

The general gill structures have, according to Kerr, "the primary function of respiration. They are also, however, provided with an elaborate muscular apparatus comprising elevators, depressors and adductors, and larva? possessing them may be seen every now and then to give them a sharp backward twitch. They are thus potentially motor organs. In such a Urodele as Amblystoma their homologues on the mandibular arch are used as supporting structures against a solid substratum exactly as are the limbs of the young Lepidosiren.

"I have, therefore, to suggest that the more ancient Gnathostomata possessed a series of potentially motor, potentially supporting structures projecting from their visceral arches; it was inherently extremely probable that these should be made use of when actual supporting and motor appendages had to be developed in connection with clambering about a solid substratum. If this had been so we should look upon the limb ab a modified external gill; the limb girdle, with Gegenbaur, as a modified branchial arch.

"This theory of the vertebrate paired limb seems to me, I confess, to be a more plausible one on the face of it than either of the two which