THE VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL KINGDOMS. 161 



habit for many generations, the legs of this order do at length 

 become long and bare, as we see them. The error of the theory 

 is in giving this adaptive principle too much to do. What un- 

 doubtedly is effectual in modifying the exterior peculiarities of 

 animals, was obviously insufficient to account for the great grades 

 of organization. In the present day, we have superior light from 

 geology and physiology, and hence comes the suggestion of a 

 process analogous to ordinary gestation for advancing organic 

 life through its grades, in the course of a long but definite space 

 of time, with only a recourse to external conditions as a means 

 of producing the exterior characters. It must nevertheless be 

 acknowledged that the germ of this natural view of the history 

 of the animated world is presented in the work of Lamarck. 1 



The idea that any of the lower animals were concerned in 

 the origin of Man, is usually scouted by unreflecting persons 

 as derogatory to human dignity. It might in the same way 

 seem a degradation to a full-grown individual, to contemplate 

 him as having once been a helpless babe upon his mother's knee, 

 or to trace him farther back, and regard him as an embryo 

 wherein no human lineaments had as yet appeared. All 

 organic things are essentially progressive : there would be no 

 end to perplexity and misjudgment, if we were to take each 

 up at its maturity, and hold it as made ridiculous by the con- 

 sideration of what it was in its earlier stages : the grandeur 

 of the oak, for instance, lost in the idea of its once having been 

 an acorn ; the nobleness of a Washington, or the intense in- 

 tellectual force of a Bonaparte, sunk in recollections of their 

 schoolboy-days. In nature much will appear humble by con- 

 trast, but to a healthy mind nothing will appear contemptible. 

 When we look in a right spirit into her mysteries, we discover 

 only the manner in which her Master is pleased to work, and 

 all then appears beautiful exceedingly. Thus it has never 



1 " If I received the Development hypothesis as a generally true ex- 

 pression of facts, I should still feel at liberty to unite with it the La- 

 marckian hypothesis. For the tendency of all recent physiological 

 investigation has been to show that the nutritive processes may be influ- 

 enced in a very remarkable degree by states of mind ; and I cannot 

 question the fact, that these do not merely affect the individual, but that 

 states of mind on the part of the parent affect the development of the 

 offspring. I cannot doubt that what have been termed the spontaneous 

 variations of animals are frequently, if not always, due to conditions, 

 mental or physical, operating upon the parent either before, or at the 

 time of, conception, or during gestation." MS. Notes of a Physiologist. 

 See upon this question the Article "Varieties of Mankind," in the Cy- 

 clopaedia of Anatomy and Physiolog}', vol. IV. pp. 1304, 1305. 



M 



