B.Dorsal aspect.] Here, then, we have a wonderful coincidence indeed; two highly complex auditory organs, marvellously similar in structure, but which must nevertheless have been developed in entire and complete independence one of the other! It would be difficult to calculate the odds against the independent occurrence and conservation of two such complex series of merely accidental and minute haphazard variations.

And it can never be {76} maintained that the sense of hearing could not be efficiently subserved otherwise than by such sacs, in cranial cartilaginous capsules so situated in relation to the brain, &c.
Our wonder, moreover, may be increased when we recollect that the two-gilled cephalopods have not yet been found below the lias, where they at once abound; whereas the four-gilled cephalopods are Silurian forms.
Moreover, the absence is in this case significant in spite of the imperfection of the geological record, because when we consider how many individuals of various kinds of four-gilled cephalopods have been found, it is fair to infer that at the least a certain small percentage of dibranchs would also have left traces of their presence had they existed.

Thus it is probable that some four-gilled form was the progenitor of the dibranch cephalopods.

Now the four-gilled kinds (judging from the only existing form, the nautilus) had the auditory organ in a very inferior condition of development to what we find in the dibranch; thus we have not only evidence of the independent high development of the organ in the former, but also evidence pointing towards a certain degree of comparative rapidity in its development.
Such being the case with regard to the organ of hearing, we have another yet stronger argument with regard to the organ of sight, as has been well pointed out by Mr.J.J.

Murphy.[60] He calls attention to the fact that the eye must have been perfected in at least "three distinct lines of descent," alluding not only to the molluscous division of the animal kingdom, and the division provided with a spinal column, but also to a third primary division, namely, that which includes all insects, spiders, crabs, &c., which are spoken of as Annulosa, and the type of whose structure is as distinct from that of the molluscous type on the one hand, as it is from that of the type with a spinal column (_i.e._ the vertebrate type) on the other.
{77} In the cuttle-fishes we find an eye even more completely constructed on the vertebrate type than is the ear.