158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



significance. We have seen how organs exactly alike in the begin- 

 ning may diiferentiate before onr eyes into parts altogether dissimilar, 

 just as individual animals of a like kind may have their progeny 

 gradually modified from generation to generation, until, finally, dif- 

 ferent races are produced from a common ancestry. The adult opos- 

 sum has rather slender and delicate limbs and fingers, and a long, 

 slender, pointed nose ; hence it may naturally be wondered that her 

 offs]>riug, even at such an eai'ly period of development, should have 

 the parts of the body of an opposite character, they being, as is shown 

 in Fig. 3, wonderfully bulky and clumsy, more like those of the hip- 

 popotamus than any thing else. But, if we look to its possible ances- 

 try, and find something similar, we can discover a tolerably satisfac- 

 tory reason for this by regarding it as inherited. Going back to the 

 Diluvial formation, we find the remains of huge fossil marsupials 

 with similar coarse, bulky proportions. Such were the Diprotodon 

 and Nototherium of New Holland. The skull of the former is three 

 feet long, really surpassing that of the hippopotamus in clumsiness, 

 while its body and limbs were built in the same bulky style, and it is 

 probable that numerous smaller marsupials of the same pattern ex- 

 isted in those remote ages. The embryo opossums show resemblance 

 to lower animals in the general shape of the body, in the early form of 

 the brain, the peculiarities of the lips, the thymus gland, the glandular 

 apparatus of the stomach, the early conditions of the reproductive 

 and urinary organs, and the primitive condition of the mammary 

 glands. Peculiar embryonic resemblances are found in the young 

 of every animal of which the embryology is known, and these facts 

 have no meaning at all to us unless they mean inheritance and 

 descent. 



* 



IDOL-WORSHIP AND FETICH-WORSHIP.' 



By HEKBERT SPENCER. 



FACTS already named show how sacrifices to the man recently 

 dead pass into sacrifices to his preserved body. We have seen 

 that to the corpse of a Tahitian chief daily ofterings were made on 

 an altar by a priest ; and the ancient Central Americans performed 

 kindred rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. That, along with 

 a developed system of embalming, this grew into mummy-worship, 

 Peruvians and Egyptians have furnished proof. Here the thing to 

 be observed is that, while believing the ghost of the dead man to 

 have gone away, these peoples had confused notions, either tliat it 



' From advance-sheets of the " Prinoiples of Sociology." 



