TYPICAL FORMS AND SPECIAL ENDS. 13 



organ to fulfil that end. By means of these two principles he can often, 

 when he is in possession of but a fragment, make the entire organism stand 

 before us with all its harmonies and its fitness. When at any time he falls 

 in with an entire fossil organism, he finds that these principles are verified, 

 and that he is entitled to proceed on them." — p. 312. 



The authors animadvert upon two common and nearly-related mistakes 

 which are sometimes made respecting the principle of development. It has 

 been supposed, on the one hand, that, through successive Geological periods, 

 there has been a progressive improvement in organic nature. This is not 

 the case. The plants and animals of the earliest ages were as well suited 

 to the conditions by which they were surrounded, and the uses which they 

 had to serve, as the plants and animals of the present day, although they 

 would not be so well fitted, if they existed now, to the present state of the 

 earth, or to supply the wants of its chief inhabitant, man. But they served 

 their purpose before they passed away ; and they may be said to continue 

 to serve one still, in furnishing another striking example of the infinite 

 wisdom and beneficence of the Creator. They afford a warning, too, how 

 cautious the wisest ought to be, — though they are not the wisest who 

 most want this caution, — not to presume that anything is useless, or even 

 that the uses of it which they are able to discern must, therefore, be the 

 most important actually. Let us imagine, for a moment, one of the angels, 

 who may have surveyed the earth at an epoch long anterior to the creation 

 of man, to have been asked concerning the utility of the luxuriant tropical 

 vegetation which then flourished upon the earth. He might probably have 

 answered, by pointing out many important purposes to which it was then 

 subservient. But no reasoning powers, of which we can form any concep- 

 tion, could have enabled him to predict that those plants, having undergone 

 certain natural changes in the course of time, would become coal, and in 

 that shape be a most important agent in promoting the comfort and mul- 

 tiplying the effective force of other beings afterwards to be placed upon the 

 earth, and of a nature only a little lower than his own. 



The second mistake which these authors have exposed is that of sup- 

 posing that man, in any stage of his existence, is like a lower animal in its 

 more advanced state, as if the lower animal were an inchoate man arrested 

 in its development. It is true that animals, ultimately the most dissimilar, 

 present comparatively few and minute points of difference in the embryo ; 

 their distinctive characters, first the more general, then the more special, 

 becoming more and more pronounced, in gradual succession, as they advance 

 towards their ultimate development. Conversely, we can conceive the dif- 



