From William Turner   [1871?]¹

Extract from a Paper on Hermaphroditism   By D^r. Robert Knox in London Medical Gazette, January 12^th., 1844—²

“I have often thought that certain organs found in the Mammalia, with whose functions we are not acquainted, and which seem to have a reference neither to the adult nor foetal condition, nor essential to individual life in any known animal, may be the remains of the organs required by that portion of the animal kingdom which has ceased to exist.³ In the composition of the skeleton of the antediluvian Sauria unusual combinations of structure are obvious: arrangements & forms of bone, with dimension and shapes, not only not familiar to us, but evidently of a nature differing widely from the present animal kingdom. It will be looked on, I fear, as too bold a flight of the imagination to conjecture that the plan of the present creation was included in the former: that the unexplained organs in animal bodies, and which are in as rudimentary, and so far as we know useless, were once developed, and formed, perhaps, important organs, in a race of animals which ceased at a time when the Earth’s surface became unfitted for their support”.—