On the Anatomy of Vertebrates: Fishes and reptiles

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Longmans, Green, and Company, 1866 - 2157 pages
This work is based entirely on personal observations.
 

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Page ii - Professor Owen's Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrate Animals, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1844 and 1846.
Page 644 - OWEN.— LECTURES ON THE COMPARATIVE ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY of the VERTEBRATE ANIMALS, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1844 and 1846.
Page xxxiv - ... has to maintain against the surrounding agencies that are ever tending to dissolve the vital bond and subjugate the living matter to the ordinary chemical and physical forces.
Page 361 - ... for uprooting or cutting down trees, or for transport and working of building materials ; they are characteristic of age and sex ; and in man they have secondary relations subservient to beauty and to speech. Teeth are always...
Page xii - Analogue, a part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal.
Page 396 - A true idea of the structure of a poisonfang will be formed by supposing the crown of a simple tooth, as that of a boa, to be pressed flat, and its edges to be then bent towards each other, and soldered together so as to form a hollow cylinder open at both ends. The flattening of the fang, and its inflection around the poison-duct...
Page 261 - It is true that the serpent has no limbs, yet it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the jerboa, and, suddenly loosing the close coils of its crouching spiral, it can spring into the air and seize the bird upon the wing: all these creatures have been observed to fall its prey.
Page 407 - In the gavials, (genus gavialis,) the teeth are nearly equal in size, and similar in form, in both jaws, and the first, as well as the fourth tooth in the lower jaw, passes into a groove in the margin of the upper jaw when the mouth is closed.
Page 405 - Thus .... each movement of the jaw with a tooth thus formed combined the power of the knife and saw; whilst the apex, in making the first incision, acted like the two-edged point of a sabre. The backward curvature of the full-grown teeth enabled them to retain, like barbs, the prey whose quivering flesh they penetrated.
Page xxxiv - ... of any gradual diminution of the size of such species, but is the result of circumstances, which may be illustrated by the fable of the ' Oak and the Reed ;' the smaller and feebler animals have bent and accommodated themselves to changes which have destroyed the larger species.

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