5 86 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



our human faculties do not recognize beauty in the useless and dwin- 

 dling rudiments of once-developed members. We are profoundly in- 

 terested in the invertebrate or molluscoid eye of the vertebrate, Ilat- 

 teria punctata, referred to by Dr. Dallinger, an eye " so buried in its 

 capsule and surrounding tissue, and so covered with the skin of the 

 head, as to make it almost inconceivable that it can be affected by even 

 the most intense light " ; but, if we are asked to admire the beauty of 

 the arrangement, if we are summoned to recognize a wonderful exam- 

 ple of order in the perpetuation of so functionless a structure, we hold 

 back. The main element in beauty is fitness, the main element in 

 order is purpose ; and we see neither fitness nor purpose here. The 

 only conceivable purpose would be to guide the biologist to the very 

 conclusion he has arrived at, namely, that a remote ancestor of Hat- 

 teria was a mollusk ; but, although as worthy, perhaps, of a few provi- 

 dential arrangements in his favor as anybody else, the biologist is not 

 prone to think that such helps as he finds on the way were designed 

 for his special benefit. He does not very well see how a past order of 

 things could help leaving traces of itself ; and he rests in the facts as 

 they are. 



Rudimentary organs, Dr. Porter assures us, bring more difficulties 

 than aids to the doctrine of evolution. This is an extraordinary state- 

 ment, seeing that competent biologists, almost without exception, have 

 taken a directly opposite view. Does the learned doctor mean to say 

 that biologists in general are radically incompetent to interpret the 

 facts with which they have to deal that facts which they ought to 

 regard as subversive of a theory, or at least as throwing serious diffi- 

 culties in its way, they accept with one accord as confirmatory of it ? 

 There is manifestly only one remedy for this state of things, and that 

 is that the biologists of Europe and America should go to school to 

 the ex-President of Yale, and learn from him how to read the book of 

 Nature. Possibly, in that case, one of his bright scholars might ask 

 him how it was, if the facts in connection with rudimentary organs 

 brought more difficulties than aids to the doctrine of evolution, that 

 he had himself declared, in the very same sentence in which that state- 

 ment was made, that, were the doctrine of evolution satisfactorily 

 established on other grounds, the existence of rudimentary organs 

 icould be consistent therewith.* Then, perhaps, the class might be 

 broken up. The scholars would, perhaps, not wait to hear the master 

 discourse on embryology, and show how the successive stages of em- 



* Here is the sentence a remarkable one : " That they [rudimentary organs] would 

 be consistent with the doctrine of evolution by favoring and continued environment, pro- 

 vided this were established on other decisive grounds, is also true ; but they bring more 

 difficulties than aid to this theory, inasmuch as the critic asks at once, If the movement 

 of evolution were so wide-spread and long-continued, why are not these broken links 

 more numerous ? " (Lecture, p. 10.) We fail to see the propriety in calling rudimentary 

 organs " broken links." 



