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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: slightly modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if to
avoid waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two
different cases, if it will suit in both?) and sometimes (more
marvellous by far) when an organ, fully developed and useful in one
species, appears in a cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as
it were, abortive; and gradually, in species still farther removed,
dies out altogether; placed there, it would seem, at first sight,
merely to keep up the family likeness. I am half jesting; that
cannot be the only reason, perhaps not the reason at all; but the
fact is one of the most curious, and notorious also, in comparative
anatomy.
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