76 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



things in course of time. And if all quadrupeds are related to 

 one another, it is for the same cause ; and if there is a certain 

 relation between men and monkeys and quadrupeds and birds 

 and reptiles, and so on ; it is because all these animals have a 

 certain common ancestry." This is the doctrine of that school, 

 and it is by the facility with which they apparently explain 

 everything that they have received the applause of the whole 

 world almost, and that they are now welcomed everywhere as 

 the true expounders of nature, and as giving satisfactory expla- 

 nations of facts of which the naturalists who have preceded 

 could give no account. 



Now, this man Heakel starts from that point : that affinity is 

 evidence of a common descent, and therefore, as he knows the 

 affinities of animals from all his investigations as well as any- 

 body else, he draws a genealogical tree, not only of the whole 

 animal kingdom, but of each class in particular. He tells us 

 which is the primary stock of polyps ; what arc the successive 

 kinds of polyps which have descended from the first ; and he 

 says these second have descended from the first in virtue of their 

 resemblance to them ; and that these third have descended from 

 the first, he affirms, on the ground of their great resemblance, 

 affinity being all the way to him the guide by which he builds 

 up his genealogical trees. He has done that, not only for the 

 polyps, but for jelly-fishes, star-fishes, sea-urchins, for all the 

 zoophytes, for the worms, for the Crustacea, for insects, fishes, 

 birds, the mammalia, and for the mammalia through the series, 

 so that he tells us from what kind of animal man is derived ; 

 and his assertion is, that he comes from a monkey-like animal, 

 the remains of which were cletectcd, a certain number of years 

 ago, in Greece. This is all very plausible ; and what is there to 

 be said against it ? I would ask plainly that : What can be 

 said against it ? Here is a man who brings his whole knowledge 

 of science, the whole knowledge of the age, (for it is not his 

 knowledge ; he takes the knowledge of everybody else, as he 

 has a right to do, as a part of his own, because he is one of the 

 representatives of science ;) here is a man, I say, who brings the 

 whole knowledge of the age to his aid, and he tells us, assuming 

 genealogy, assuming affinity, to be derived from common 

 descent, " Here is my genealogical tree — what have you got to 

 say against it '.' " And when I first looked at it, I said, " There 



