Q,

Thanks for the reference. I did not read it but did copy it for my file which I will never read. I seem to recall that when I originally put the item together, I carefully read that piece three or five times then turned off the big red switch on the side of my computer and cut the modem chord with a scissor. That made it, of course, a chord-not-a. The title of Dr Waggoner's most interesting page adds to my notion that the song is (was) known to marine biologists but also to invertebrate paleontologist / evolutionary biologists.

If you have still more interest in this stuff (and God help you, if you do) I refer you to Joe's info which included:

Jeff Moran's "Dr. Chordate" pages include a copy of the song [http://www.tranquility.net/~scimusic/lyrics.html#Biologysongs] and mention of its presence in the book "Songs of Biology" in 1948.
Joseph M. Newcomer has presented The Annotated Amphioxus [http://www.flounder.com/amphioxus.htm], which explains much of the terminology of the song.
The excellent Cephalochordate page at the web site of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, California, has lots of information about the amphioxus and, in the page title, makes reference to the song.
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You can hear Sam on RealAudio singing it AND trying to explain/intro the thing at http://www.sandiegohistory.org/audio/hinton/amphioxus.ram (but buy the tape, anyway.)