252 INDIAN CYPRINID. 
pass through a succession of species connected together by direct relations, and 
after arriving at an opposite point (Opsarius) at which the forms, habits, and 
other in nature, Cuvier and Valenciennes observe, “he alone could build up such a pretension who 
would attempt to place animated nature on a single line, a project which we have long since re- 
nounced as one of the most false that could be entertained in natural history.”—H/storze Naturelle 
des Poissons. 
On the same subject, another authority observes—‘‘ The day is now happily gone past when 
zoologists thought that the infinite variety of animals which inhabit this globe owed their origin to 
the unsuccessful efforts of nature before she could attain the human structure as her term of 
perfection.” —Macleay—Lin. Transac. 
“As to the rule of natural progression, is it linear? The idea of a simple scale in nature had 
long been discussed and finally abandoned.” —Smwatnson’s Discourse on the study of Natural History. 
As all natural objects have three relations of affinity, it is clear the chain that-connects them 
cannot be straight, and not being straight the next simplest form is circular, but there is no 
objection to the progression of affinities being square or oval, provided they can be proved to be so; it 
is less the form than the circumstance of the opposite extremes of a natural series meeting, that 
is insisted on. 
Some notion of circular affinities appears to have existed from an early date. Hermann in his 
Tabula Afinitatum Animalium, published in 1783, as Mr. Macleay points out, refers to an earlier 
writer who, like himself, seems to have had a glimpse of the same truth. Lin. Transac. vol. 14, p. 49. 
M. Lamark detected the existence of a double series which setting out in opposite directions from a given 
point met together at another. Unacquainted with the result to which Lamark had been led, Prof. 
Fischer in 1808, perceived a tendency in the series of affinities to form a circle ; but these obscure inti- 
mations were first established by analyses in the Hore Entomologice of Mr. Macleay published in 
1819. Since then Mr. Vigors submitted a general analysis of the whole class of birds to the Linnean 
Society, in all the groups of which he found the affinities to confirm what had been observed by Mr. 
Macleay during his examination of insects, as well as the views contained in a subsequent publica- 
tion recorded in the Linnean Transactions, in which the same principles were applied by Mr. Macleay 
to the whole animal kingdom. ‘The birds of New Holland were subsequently examined by Messrs. 
