I 
WHAT ARE SPECIES 
5 
“special creations” in each country; and these conclusions 
were arrived at after a careful study of Lamarck’s work, a full 
abstract of which is given in the earlier editions of the 
Principles of Geology} 
Professor Agassiz, one of the greatest naturalists of the last 
generation, went even further, and maintained not only that 
each species was specially created, but that it was created in 
the proportions and in the localities in which we now find it 
to exist. The following extract from his very instructive 
book on Lake Superior explains this view: “There are in 
animals peculiar adaptations which are characteristic of their 
species, and which cannot be supposed to have arisen from 
subordinate influences. Those which live in shoals cannot be 
supposed to have been created in single pairs. Those which 
are made to be the food of others cannot have been created 
in the same proportions as those which live upon them. 
Those which are everywhere found in innumerable specimens 
must have been introduced in numbers capable of maintaining 
their normal proportions to those which live isolated and are 
comparatively and constantly fewer. For we know that this 
harmony in the numerical proportions between animals is 
one of the great laws of nature. The circumstance that 
species occur within definite limits where no obstacles prevent 
their wider distribution leads to the further inference that 
these limits were assigned to them from the beginning, and 
so we should come to the final conclusion that the order 
which prevails throughout nature is intentional, that it is 
regulated by the limits marked out on the first day of 
creation, and that it has been maintained unchanged through 
ages with no other modifications than those which the higher 
intellectual powers of man enable him to impose on some 
few animals more closely connected with him. ’ 2 
These opinions of some of the most eminent and influential 
writers of the pre-Darwinian age seem to us, now, either 
altogether obsolete or positively absurd; but they never¬ 
theless exhibit the mental condition of even the most 
advanced section of scientific men on the problem of the 
1 These expressions occur in Chapter IX. of the earlier editions (to the 
ninth) of the Principles of Geology. 
- L. Agassiz, Lake Superior, p. 377. 
