DISTRIBUTION OF ORGANISMS. 221 



conclude that, being in its totality an artificial object, the 

 garden was the work of some maker or artificer. And so also, 

 when we attain a knowledge of the artificiality which is at the 

 basis of nature, must we conclude that nature is wholly the 

 production of a being resembling, but infinitely greater than 

 ourselves. 



By the same light we are enabled to see more clearly than 

 ever the providential arrangement with respect to the various 

 characters of animals : some to draw nutriment directly from 

 the vegetable kingdom ; others to keep the numbers of these 

 in check, and prevent their carcases from cumbering the earth 

 to be, in fact, a medium for returning their constituent sub- 

 stances to the atmosphere from which these were originally 

 extracted by the vegetation \ others again destined to a higher 

 and more intelligent enjoyment than either, and turning animal 

 as well as vegetable substances to their use. It is most interest- 

 ing also to trace by this light the perseverance of characters 

 and habits, and even of points in organization, from grade to 

 grade. The Iguanodon, the huge reptile of the Wealden, has 

 lately been inferred on good grounds by Dr. Mantell to have 

 " possessed a large prehensile tongue and fleshy lips, capable of 

 being protruded and retracted, and which must have formed 

 most efficient instruments for seizing and cropping the foliage 

 and branches of ferns, cycadeae, and coniferous trees ;" an 

 application of facts of the organization we see kept up in those 

 herbivorous mammalia (cattle and horses, for example), which 

 we may presume to be merely an advance on the same line of 

 existence. Travelling in the East, we might see the gavial 

 acting as the scavenger of the Ganges, and the dog serving the 

 same purpose in the neglected streets of great cities : the latter, 

 a descendant of the line of being of which the former is an off- 

 shoot, merely serves on land the purpose served by his relative 

 in the river. The vulture corresponds amongst birds, and the 

 shark amongst fishes, to the dog amongst the mammalian car- 

 nivora : behold all of these animals furnished alike with the 

 most acute powers of smell, for the discovery of their prey. 

 A living naturalist speaks thus of the resemblance of the parrots 

 to the monkeys : " There can be little doubt that the parrots, 

 among birds, emulate the monkeys among placentals : they eat 

 all kinds of food they can procure ; they obtain it in the same 

 situations they seek it in the same way, by climbing, for 

 a parrot actually climbs like a monkey ; it does not leap or run 

 like other birds ; but, like a monkey, or more especially a 



