On this head Mr.Mivart remarks: "Did no special provision exist, the young one must infallibly be choked by the intrusion of the milk into the wind-pipe.
But there IS a special provision.

The larynx is so elongated that it rises up into the posterior end of the nasal passage, and is thus enabled to give free entrance to the air for the lungs, while the milk passes harmlessly on each side of this elongated larynx, and so safely attains the gullet behind it." Mr.Mivart then asks how did natural selection remove in the adult kangaroo (and in most other mammals, on the assumption that they are descended from a marsupial form), "this at least perfectly innocent and harmless structure ?" It may be suggested in answer that the voice, which is certainly of high importance to many animals, could hardly have been used with full force as long as the larynx entered the nasal passage; and Professor Flower has suggested to me that this structure would have greatly interfered with an animal swallowing solid food.
We will now turn for a short space to the lower divisions of the animal kingdom.

The Echinodermata (star-fishes, sea-urchins, etc.) are furnished with remarkable organs, called pedicellariae, which consist, when well developed, of a tridactyle forceps--that is, of one formed of three serrated arms, neatly fitting together and placed on the summit of a flexible stem, moved by muscles.

These forceps can seize firmly hold of any object; and Alexander Agassiz has seen an Echinus or sea-urchin rapidly passing particles of excrement from forceps to forceps down certain lines of its body, in order that its shell should not be fouled.
But there is no doubt that besides removing dirt of all kinds, they subserve other functions; and one of these apparently is defence.
With respect to these organs, Mr.Mivart, as on so many previous occasions, asks: "What would be the utility of the FIRST RUDIMENTARY BEGINNINGS of such structures, and how could such insipient buddings have ever preserved the life of a single Echinus ?" He adds, "not even the SUDDEN development of the snapping action would have been beneficial without the freely movable stalk, nor could the latter have been efficient without the snapping jaws, yet no minute, nearly indefinite variations could simultaneously evolve these complex co-ordinations of structure; to deny this seems to do no less than to affirm a startling paradox." Paradoxical as this may appear to Mr.Mivart, tridactyle forcepses, immovably fixed at the base, but capable of a snapping action, certainly exist on some star-fishes; and this is intelligible if they serve, at least in part, as a means of defence.

Mr.Agassiz, to whose great kindness I am indebted for much information on the subject, informs me that there are other star-fishes, in which one of the three arms of the forceps is reduced to a support for the other two; and again, other genera in which the third arm is completely lost.