"When you terrestrials do go into the water you imitate the dog or the horse and swim with your heads above the water, whereby you lose all the advantage for aquatic life your physical construction gives you over these animals.
"The structure and shape of your limbs, of your hands and your feet, show that you were intended not for walking—which you do awkwardly and insecurely on two limbs only—but for swimming; and that not on the surface like a dog or a duck, but below the water like a seal. Look at your broad flat palms, and the fingers capable of being so approximated as to give you precisely the flipper of the seal with the additional advantage of a long lever in the arm. How unlike a dog, whose mode of swimming you yet imitate! He has a narrow paw, incapable of offering any great resistance to the water.
"Then look at your foot, so ill adapted for walking that you have to cover it with stout leather to prevent it being cut to pieces by the ground you walk on; but so admirably fitted for propelling you in the water, whilst its curved and arched back offers the least resistance to the water when you draw up your leg towards your body in swimming, preparatory to striking out again.
"Your physiologists pretend to derive the human race from those hideous monsters, the apes; but some of the most sagacious among them are forced to acknowledge that man shows signs of having been derived from a marine ancestor. How it has escaped them that we must have a common ancestor with the seal, I know not. And yet it is a well-ascertained fact that the brain of a seal in size and general appearance more nearly resembles that of man than
