common fate was to be killed on land, to be eaten more or less entirely on land, or to decay quickly above ground. If by chance one fell from the branches into a forest stream, there were, doubtless, crocodilians at hand-greedy brutes with no consideration for the continuity of the geological record. The remains of Certainly Arboreal, therefore, still await due discovery and identification, and interment in Westminster Abbey or Cromwell Road.

He lived, perhaps, upon fruits, corrected, possibly, by a soupçon of beetles, moths, and the like creeping things. One may fancy that at times some of his tastes and thoughts float still through our minds in a ghostly manner. Does anything, for instance, give us now a keener delight than the golden transfiguration of sunlight among forest leaves? Why should the greenwood be such a pleasure and rest for toiling men? We fear a lion because it is obviously big and fierce, but our dread of snakes, the curse of the tropical forest, is instinctive. Again, if stinging and lethal insects had not been a constant danger to our Certainly Arboreal sires, it would be hard. to explain the innate dread and dislike we feel for spiders and suchlike leggy, creepy, unsubstantial things. The inoffensive, friendly cockroach suffers, I fancy, for the sins of the poisonous tropical bug. Our antipathy to insects was stamped upon the brain of Certainly Arboreal hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The sires of Certainly Arboreal must have lived before the time when a sea like the Bay of Bengal, receiving the mud of great semitropical rivers, covered England from Wiltshire eastward. They were, perhaps, simpler and more archaic lemurs. They and the descendants of the living Insectivora, the shrews for instance, may possibly have drawn closer to each other in those ancient times. But the portrait is very foggy now. Had this remoter ancestor ventured among the branches yet, or did he creep upon the ground? What did he eat? Did his wife carry her babies in a pouch, after the manner of the living opossum and kangaroo? Did he peer, a queer little lemuroid face, among the branches, at the tapir-like Palæotherium below? Did he counsel his wife (or wives) not to be afraid, and with a gleam of prophetic inspiration behold himself, or his progeny, glorious in the spoils of the earth and bestriding the horse, the nobler son of the Palæotheriums? When wolf-like Cynodon chased him, panting, up a tree, did he console himself with the thought that a time would come when the dog would gratefully lick the hand that beat it? Probably the birds with the big teeth, that were his contemporaries, made him feel uncomfortable at times. Perhaps the temper of the democeras was as bad as that of the living rhinoceros,

and our ancestor was chased by the monster out of pure spite and viciousness. He may have had his humiliations in spite of his future.

The family portraits that should come next are quite beyond the scientific imagination at present. Western Europe, at least, was under water-rather deep water-for a long time before the lemuroid animals appeared. In the chalk, the legacy we have of that oceanic time, there are remains of sponges and sea-urchins, plentiful enough, shell-fish and other marine denizens, but not a sign of what went on upon land during that time. Where there are shallow water remains, few hints are discovered to help us with our pedigree. The still older remains that came on the other side of the gap show the big reptiles, the Plesiosaurus, Ichthyosaurus and Deinosaurus-lords of the earth.

Just a few bones that have come to hand from those remoter times have been identified as those of mammals, hairy quadrupeds akin to us. One of the jawbones of Phascolotherium in our museums may, for all we precisely know to the contrary, be a last vestige of the Parent of Mankind. It must have been a half-reptilian creature, hairy perhaps, but strongly suspected of laying eggs after the reptile fashion. In the old Triassic rocks of South Africa reptiles' skeletons showing no uncertain tendency to mammalian structure have been found. It was probably subsequent to the epoch of vegetative luxuriance which gave us our coal, that the families of reptile and mammal drifted apart.

It seems not unlikely that these yet remoter ancestors were amphibious. Instead of hatching out in almost adult completeness from the egg, they may have begun the world at an earlier stage. There must have been a tadpole stage once in the life-history of the human forerunner. Gill slits, that still are to be found in the unborn child, served then a useful purpose in the aeration of the blood of the larval animal. We may fancy that in the great Carboniferous swamp, where the gigantic cryptogams and Lepidodendra were storing up the sun's energy for the boiler furnaces of to-day, the youthful great, great, great-the reader must now supply a hundred-page volume or so of greats-grandfather of Watt and Stephenson wagged his little tail and fled before the yawning jaws and labyrinthine teeth of Anthracosaurus.

The next dim figure in our gallery is a fish, not a shapely fish like the trout, gleaming splendid with silvery scales, beautiful in every line of his form, but something distinctly ugly-a coarse fish, clumsy and slimy, after the fashion of a dogfish or skate, a dirty, indiscriminate feeder, a frequenter of mud and the shallows. The clumsy

Lepidosiren at the Zoological Gardens may give, perhaps, some idea of his shape. Possibly he was sheltered in a cuirass of bone. For all we know to the contrary, his fossil relics may be duly named and labelled in some of our museums now.

Beyond the Old Red Sandstone rocks in which these fish ancestors of ours lived, the remains of vertebrata are few and far between. It would seem that some of these most archaic forms were heavily armoured creatures without limbs. The two lowest among the true vertebrata that live now, the lamprey and the hagfish, are also, we may notice, without any trace of limbs. They are also peculiar in having no proper jaws, but instead a peculiar round, suctorial mouth. The hag-fish, moreover, is the only instance of a vertebrated animal with parasitic habits. Whether, however, either of these creatures can be considered as really throwing much light upon the ancestral vertebrata is a inatter for consideration. Certain anomalous fossils on the Silurian rocks have been regarded as the horny teeth from the circular mouth of some lamprey-like form, but they are just as probably the remains of worms.

Beyond this the obscurity thickens to an absolutely opaque condition. Either the remoter ancestors had no teeth, or scales, or any bone to become a fossil, or the pressure and heat of the intervening ages have crushed and flattened the relics beyond our power of recognition.

Turning from geology to comparative anatomy to help us to make a further guess at the ancestral features, we find the zoologists advocating very divergent views. We are directed to the obscure lancelet, an inch-long, semi-transparent creature, living half buried in sand, brainless, limbless, without jaws or heart, cartilage or bone, as our cousin at the next remove. Or, again, we are pointed to certain marine worms. The Whale's Tongue, a curious marine creature living saturated in sand and slime, also presents a strange mixture of features distinctive of vertebrata, and others suggestive of a relationship with star-fish and sea-urchin. And a fantastic correlation of sea scorpion and vertebrata, hailing from America, recently appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science. The discussion of the relative value of all these remote resemblances is still proceeding, and in the cloud of this discussion the definite human pedigree, for the present, must end. Later, we may hope to see it carried further, and the insect, crustacean, star-fish and jellyfish, mollusc and plant, disease germ and ferment, linked together by one comprehensive and certain genealogy into a united and mutually dependent being of life.

H. G. WELLS.

THE

THE FATAL NUMBER.

HE soft sunshine of a Roman spring was irradiating the streets as Signora Marietta trotted down the Corso on her little, highheeled, pointed-toed shoes, in her winter dress and cloak, which looked rather shabby in the sunshine. She had just given a singing lesson to one of her few pupils, an English lady in the Pensione dell' Unione, and had been paid for a month's lessons. The expression of happiness on her face was directly connected with the tiny roll of paper in her tightly-clenched hand. Perhaps, as happiness is a relative quantity, she derived as much satisfaction to-day from that hardearned fifty francs as she had derived thirty years ago from three times the amount, received as payment for her singing of "Rosina" or "La Sonnambula," with compliments, bouquets, admiring ovations in poetry (always written by titled gentlemen on gold-edged paper), and other pleasant accompaniments to boot. Perhaps so. But thirty years ago the attendant angels, Youth and Hope, had hovered around Signora Marietta, creating their own unequalled rosy atmosphere, whilst to-day they had fled, carrying illusions of all sorts with them, and stern reality was the fact that the former prima donna had to drudge as singing mistress for her daily bread, with no one to admire or praise.

On this bright spring day the Signora's imaginative brain was busy with the fifty francs, which were as a key unlocking many possible doors, a pleasingly bewildering which? being the question. The house-rent was paid already, thanks to the Madonna and some other pupils. A new dress? Scarcely enough for that. A mantle ? Unnecessary, for summer was so near, and, as the Signora reflected, "I have done without a spring mantle so cleverly, by telling my pupils that the key of my wardrobe was lost."

That wardrobe and its treasures! Manifold were they, robes and vestments innumerable; but the key was never found, so they remained unknown quantities to all the Signora's acquaintances.

A good dinner at the restaurant suggested itself to her consideration, and with so much insistence that five francs of the sum was mentally reserved for that purpose. "Three francs for a mass for

Benedetto's soul," she calculated, "and a little present for Pina, one does well to be generous to the servants now and then, andBlessed saints and holy Madonna ! my dream!"

The cause of this sudden ejaculation, betokening that the Signora's thoughts had been diverted into a new channel, was a tiny shop, almost hidden by the larger and gayer ones on each side of it. Nothing was to be seen in its darkened window except a few tickets with numbers on them. Over the door was a placard announcing the

GRAND NATIONAL LOTTERY,

and inviting the public to "tempt fortune, which may make you rich in a moment, without running any risk." The prize of 100,000 francs was to be drawn without fail, as fixed by law irrevocabilmente on April 30.

For the rest of the way home Signora Marietta was unconscious of the outer world, her brain was busied with abstruse mathematical calculations; she hurried along the streets hearing and seeing nothing, climbed the several flights of stairs leading to her flat absorbed in thought, and finally burst in upon her little home like a bomb.

The home was a tiny appartamento of four rooms, one of which was let to a student, the remaining three-a small bedroom, a diningroom, and a kitchen-opened upon one of those little terraces so dear to the Italian heart, with its gaily-painted wall representing a very blue sea and a very fiery Vesuvius in incessant and active eruption; some pots of flowers gave the idea of a garden, and a canary sang gaily in his little cage. The Signora crossed the terrace hastily, and passed through the dining-room (with its red-brick floor, its conventional sofa and six chairs covered with bright green silk, and the three tutelary saints or household gods-Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti-gazing in the mild majesty of chromo-lithography down from the walls), and burst into the kitchen, where she discovered Pina doing her hair by the hearth and conversing with the domestic fowl. This was a young cock, who was kept on the premises to be fattened up for culinary purposes, enjoying all the privileges of a member of the family in the meantime. "Poverino, he keeps me company," Pina would say of each successive fowl in

The present one was pecking away cheerfully at some lettuce. leaves. Some day old Pina would wring his neck, pluck and truss him with the same cheerful benevolence, but until the fatal moment they were good friends, and the cock accepted matters on the same footing. No looking before and after, no pining for what is not, but a leaf of salad to-day, and to-morrow is yet unborn. Pina's and the