STEREOGNATHUS 313 



dences become " correlations " — is our faith in the soundness 

 of the conclusions deduced from the application of such rational 

 law of correlations ; and with the certainty of such application 

 is associated a greater facility of its application. A knowledge 

 of the physiological conditions governing the relations of the 

 contents of the cavities of bones to the flight and other modes 

 of locomotion in birds both enabled the writer to infer from 

 one fragment of a skeleton that it belonged to a terrestrial bird 

 deprived of the power of flight, and to predict that such a bird, 

 but of less rapid course than the ostrich, would ultimately be 

 found in New Zealand.* 



This principle, however — those modes of thought — which 

 Cuvier affirmed to have guided him in his interpretation of 

 fossil remains, and which he believed to be a true clue in such 

 researches, were repudiated or contested by some of his contem- 

 poraries. 



Geoffroy St. Hilaire denied the existence of a design in the 

 construction of any part of an organized body ; he protested 

 against the deduction of a purpose from the contemplation of 

 such structures as the valves of the veins or the converging 

 lens of the eye. 



Beyond the co-existence of such a form of flood-gate with 

 such a course of the fluid, or of such a course of light with such 

 a converging medium, Geoffroy affirmed that thought, at least 

 his mode of thinking, could not sanely, or ought not to go. 



The present is not the place for even the briefest summary 

 of the arguments which have been adduced by teleologists and 

 antiteleologists from Democritus and Plato down to Comte and 

 Whewell. The writer would merely remark, that in the degree 

 in which the reasoning faculty is developed on this planet and 

 is exercised by our species, it appears to be a more healthy 

 and normal condition of such faculty, — certainly one which 

 has been productive of most accession to truths, as exemplified 



* Transactions of the Zoological Society, vol. iii., p. 32, pi. 3. 



