Excerpt from Winners in Life's Race, or the Great Backboned Family, Vol. 1: Fishes and BirdsAlthough the present volume, as giving an account of the vertebrate animals, is a natural sequel to, and completion of, my former book, se and ker CM! A'ren, which treated of invertebrates, yet it is a more independent work, both in plan and execution, than I had at first contemplated.This arises from the nature of the subject. The structure and habits of the lower forms of life are sufficiently simple to be treated almost without refer ence to geological history. When, however, I began to sketch out the lives and structure of the vertebrate animals, which are so closely interlinked one with another and yet so sharply separated into groups, I soon found that I must carry my readers into the past in order to give any intelligible account of the present.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.