y unlike when
full grown, but in their young stages go through essentially similar
metamorphoses.

No animal is perhaps in this respect more interesting than the Horse.
The skull of a Horse and that of a Man, though differing so much, are,
says Flower,[11] "composed of exactly the same number of bones, having
the same general arrangement and relation to each other. Not only the
individual bones, but every ridge and surface for the attachment of
muscles, and every hole for the passage of artery or nerve, seen in the
one can be traced in the other." It is often said that the Horse
presents a remarkable peculiarity in that the canine teeth grow but
once. There are, however, in most Horses certain spicules or minute
points which are shed before the appearance of the permanent canines,
and which are probably the last remnants of the true milk canines.

The foot is reduced to a single toe, representing the third digit, but
the second and fourth, though rudimentary, are represented by the splint
bones; while the foot also contains traces of several muscles,
originally belonging to the toes which have now disappeared, and which
"linger as it were behind, with new relations and uses, sometimes in a
reduced, and almost, if not quite, functionless condition." Even Man
himself presents traces of gill-openings, and indications of other
organs which are fully developed in lower animals.

MODIFICATIONS

There is in New Zealand a form of Crow (Hura), in which the female has
undergone a very curious modification. It is the only case I know, in
which the bill is differently shaped in the two sexes. The bird has
taken on the habits of a Woodpecker, and the stout crow-like bill of the
cock-bird is admirably adapted to tap trees, and if they sound hollow,
to dig down to the burrow of the Insect; but it lacks the horny-pointed
tip of the tongue, which in the true Woodpecker is provided with
recurved hairs, thus enabling that bird to pierce the grub and draw it
out. In the Hura, however, the bill of the hen-bird has become much
elongated and slightly curved, and when the cock has dug down to the
burrow, the hen inserts her long bill and draws out the grub, which
they then divide between them: a very pretty illustration of the wife as
helpmate to the husband.

It was indeed until lately the general opinion that animals and plants
came into existence just as we now see them. We took pleasure in their
beauty; their adaptation to their ha