380 Miscellaneous. 



favourable to the doctrine of derivation than is the general. rule of a 

 pure and simple ascending gradation. We refer to what Agassiz calls 

 prophetic and synthetic types ; for which the former name may 

 suffice, as the difference between the two is evanescent. 



" It has been noticed," writes our great zoologist, " that certain 

 types, which are frequently prominent among the representatives of 

 past ages, combine in their structure peculiarities which at later 

 periods are only observed separately in different, distinct types. 

 Sauroid fishes before reptiles, Pterodactyles before birds, Ichthyo- 

 sauri before dolphins, &c. There are entire families of nearly every 

 class of animals, which in the state of their perfect development 

 exemplify such prophetic relations. . . . The Sauroid fishes of the past 

 geological ages are an example of this kind. These fishes, which pre- 

 ceded the appearance of reptiles, present a combination of ichthyic 

 and reptilian characters not to be found in the true members of this 

 class, which form its bulk at present. The Pterodactyles, which 

 preceded the class of Birds, and the Ichthyosauri, which preceded 

 the Cetacea, are other examples of such prophetic types*." 



Now these reptile-like fishes, of which Gar-pikes are the living 

 representatives, though of earlier appearance, are admittedly of higher 

 rank than common fishes. They dominated until reptiles appeared, 

 when they mostly gave place to (or, as the derivationists will insist, 

 were resolved by divergent variation and natural selection into) com- 

 mon fishes, destitute of reptilian characters, and saurian reptiles, — 

 the intermediate grades, which, according to a familiar piscine say- 

 ing, are " neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring," being eliminated 

 and extinguished by natural consequence of the struggle for existence 

 which Darwin so aptly pourtrays. And so, perhaps, of the other 

 prophetic types. Here type and antitype correspond. If these are 

 true prophecies, we need not wonder that some who read them in 

 Agassiz's book will read their fulfilment in Darwin's. 



Note also, in this connexion, that, along with a wonderful persis- 

 tence of type, with change of species, genera, orders, &c, from 

 formation to formation, no species and no higher group which has 

 once unequivocally died out ever afterwards reappears. Why is this, 

 but that the link of generation has been sundered ? Why, on the 

 hypothesis of independent originations, were not failing species re- 

 created, either identically or with a difference, in regions eminently 

 adapted to their well-being ? To take a striking case. That no part 

 of the world now offers more suitable conditions for wild horses and 

 cattle than the Pampas and other plains of South America, is shown 

 by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously 

 multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. 

 There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the Mastodon 

 and Megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild horses 

 and cattle — the former certainly very much like the existing Horse 

 — roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of ori- 



* Agassiz, 'Contributions :' Essay on Classification, p. 117, where, we may 

 be permitted to note, the word " Crustacea " is by a typographical error 

 printed in place of Cetacea. 



