If, then, omissions can take place in an alleged descent and additions to any amount be admitted, who can believe in such a law of heritage? Of what use is it to prove anything? and who can listen to its evidence, when it shows a rudimental transitory resemblance to a fish, or other lower animal, in the embryo of a vertebrate animal?

The serpent form, devoid both of the anterior and posterior limbs, may be taken as another instance. It is an animal apparently without the organs of locomotion, and if seen for the first time would be pronounced to be an immovable machine; but by other contrivances, which we certainly never should have imagined, with what rapidity can it move, and execute all its terrible designs! The artist of the animal form has not been circumscribed within the limits of our ideas, but has in thousands of instances proved to us that there may be something far beyond transmutation and the law of descent, in the mystery of organic structure.

But now we come to the bat, and its finger-stretched wing. It was not created a bat, we are told, but was worked out of some other form by Natural Selection, in the usual protracted operation carried on through multiplied ages. It had, however, some other wingless body before the operation began: it was some animal of some sort before the process of transformation commenced; and as there are several sorts of bats, and several sizes of them, some of them must have been as small as mice, and some as large as rabbits. If we were to concede that they used to live on insects before they acquired their wings-and there seems to be no other alternative-they must have been pinched with scanty fare in their first state, as they do not procure more than sufficient now with their very

rapid flight. However, in due time the process of wingmaking began. Their fore feet or paws began to lengthen, but oh, how slowly! The hundredth part of an inch in a thousand years would be quick work with Natural Selection but the bones lengthened. When they had been elongated to the fourth part of their present extension, what a miserable condition must the poor creatures have been in they had lost their paws, which we cannot but suppose used to do them some service, and had got nothing as yet by the change. They could not run as they used, and they could not fly. But the Theory requires us to suppose that the Transmutation thus far advanced had been found advantageous, though it must certainly have been injurious and we are further to suppose that all the unchanged animals, on whom this process had not been carried on, were dying off in the struggle for life, and that the quarter-bats were triumphing. So they went on lengthening their bones, and exterminating all competitors till nothing was left but the perfect bat!

Now this seriously is the history of their formation according to the Theory. There can be no other; and this history may serve for all other transmutations, mutatis mutandis. It is, indeed, too ridiculous for the pages of Natural History, and is worth only this, that it may convince the inquirer of the impossibility of these changes, as the intermediate state required in these transmutations could have no other effect than to exterminate the animals*

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• This has been noticed by Professor Owen in his Palæontology. He quotes Mr Darwin's imaginary case of dogs preying on hares and rabbits -the rabbits become scarce, and the hares increase; in this emergency the dog would endeavour to catch more hares, and those individuals with slightly plastic limbs, longest legs, and best eye-sight, would be slightly favoured,' would tend to live longer, and survive when the food was scarcest. They would also rear more young, which would tend to inherit

ing through it, not those which the Theory supposes were destroyed as the consequence of their remaining stationary.

The case of the bat seems to puzzle even Mr Darwin, for he says, 'if it had been asked how an insectivorous quadruped could possibly have been converted into a flying bat, the question would have been far more difficult, and I could have given no answer' (198).

That is, the author of the Theory cannot explain the process of formation; and yet when we confess our inability to explain the first appearance of an animal in the theatre of life, and refer it to the act of a Creator, we are twitted with our ignorance, and our attempt to conceal it by such a reference. Here, however, Mr Darwin is precisely in the same position with us-' he can give no answer.' NESCIO is the explanation; and so it is with us, only we leave the matter where we are sure there is a power that is equal to all these difficulties. Mr Darwin leaves it with nothing, though he has in his hands Natural Selection, in which he assures us he has such confidence,' that he sees no difficulty in believing' anything he may ascribe to its operation.

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Having, however, thus candidly confessed to a check

the slight peculiarities. The less fleet ones would be rigidly destroyed. 'I see no reason to doubt that these causes would in a thousand generations produce a marked effect, and adapt the form of the dog to catching hares.'

On this Professor Owen remarks: 'Yet this condition of things, if followed out to its full consequences, seems only to tend to my original inference, viz. an extinction of species, for when the hares were all destroyed the long-legged dogs would perish--at most, there could but be a reversion to the first form and conditions' (435). We may add, that the slightly plastic limbs' is a gentle phrase for self-transforming, and is a covert assumption of the whole question. These short-legged dogs, however, would die in a very short time for want of food. One generation would see them all out: we need not speculate on a thousand.

This imaginary case is strictly Lamarckian, it is based on the principle of appetency.

mate, Mr Darwin adds these words: 'Yet I think such difficulties have little weight.' What then can have weight in such scales as these? a hundred-weight seems not to be reckoned so much as a scruple in the School of Transmutation.

CHAPTER XIV.

ORGANIC DISTINCTIONS.

WE have been speaking of similarities of organization, we have now to say something of the ordinations of division or distinction, by which certain animals, whatever may be the similarity of parts of their limbs or bodies, are arranged in broad manifest separation of distinct groups, so as to preclude the idea of any possible transition from one to the other.

In a popular view of the animal kingdom this would appear sufficiently plain in the most obvious examples, as, for instance, the distinction between the carnivora and the ruminants; for no one uninitiated in the mysteries of the Transmutationists could ever be brought to believe that a cow had, by any quantity of changes in her ancestors, proceeded from the stock which produced a tiger or a lion. But though this common-sense view of the question of Distinction of animals is really unanswerable, yet there are some other considerations of deeper moment that claim our attention.

Physiologists who have carefully studied organic beings, with a view to establish some fundamental system of arrangement, have observed these distinctions :-