Note 24 — Chapter XI · THE VERTEBRATE CHARACTER OF MAN

The ideal figure of the vertebrate as given in Figs. 98–102 is a hypothetical scheme or diagram, that has been chiefly constructed on the lines of the amphioxus, but with a certain attention to the comparative anatomy and ontogeny of the ascidia and appendicularia on the one hand, and of the cyclostoma and selachii on the other. This diagram has no pretension whatever to be an “exact picture,” but merely an attempt to reconstruct hypothetically the unknown and long extinct vertebrate stem-form, an ideal “archetype.”