We will not read farther to-day, as I want to tell you in this chapter
something about life in what are called its lower forms, and we shall
find that wherever we may look, every creature is perfect in itself, and
perfectly suited to the life appointed to it by its Creator, and the home
where He has placed it.
My children had learnt something about the two great divisions of animals,
those which belong to the great Backboned Family and those which have no
backbone. It is of the latter that we shall speak today. You know that a
fish has a backbone, and that it is beautifully formed, for you have often
seen it; but perhaps you have not noticed that a lobster, though called one
of the shell-fish, is quite unlike the true Fishes: its skeleton is not
inside, but outside; there are no bones within, but all the soft parts are
inside, and the hard parts outside; while the body of a fish is formed on
just the opposite plan. The fish is called a _Vertebrate_ animal, because
it has a backbone, made up of numbers of separate bones called vertebras.
Some of us know that this word comes from the Latin, and means _that which
turns_, because these many small bones are so beautifully jointed together
as to be all perfectly moveable, so that the long bone which they form is
very flexible. Some snakes have more than three hundred of these vertebrae,
and you know how they can coil and twist their glittering length.
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