50 



THE GEXhSIS OF SPECIES. 



[Cjiap. 



m 



utility of tliese appendages is, even now, proLleniatieal. It 

 may be that they remove from the surface of tlie animal's 

 hody foreign snhstances wliich would be prejudicial to it, 

 nnd whitli it cannot otlierwise get rid of. I'ut granting 

 this, what would be the utility of the first rudimentary 

 hrginninrjs of such structures, and how could 

 such incipient buddings have ever preserv^ed 

 the life of a single Echinus ? It is true that 

 on Darwinian principles the ancestral form 

 from which the sea-urchin developed was 

 different, and must not be conceived merely 

 as an Echinus devoid of pedicellarije ; but 

 this makes the difficulty none the less. It 

 is equally hard to imagine that the first 

 rudiments of such structures could have 

 been useful to ani/ animal from which the 

 Echinus might have been derived. More- 

 over, not even the sudden development of 

 the snajiping action could have been bene- 

 ficial witliout the freely moveable stalk, nor 

 could the latter have been efficient without 

 the snapping jaws, yet no minute merely 

 indefinite variations could sinudtaneously 

 evolve these complex co-ordinations of stnic- 

 ture: to deny this seems e([uivalent to 

 aflirming a startling paradox. 



Mr. Darwin exj)lains the appearance of 

 some structures, the utility of wliich is not apparent, by the 

 existence of certain " laws of con-elation." V>\ these he means 

 that certain parts or organs of the body are so related to 

 other organs or parts, that when the first are modified by the 

 action of " Natural Selection," or what not, the second are 



pedicellaki.t:. 



(Iiiiiiieiisfly 

 enlarged.) 



