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afterwards surpassed by the reptiles, and these also, after an interval, 
by the mammals. 
“The theory of successive creations in the present state of our 
knowledge is the only one admissible, though I am bound to add that 
it is by no means satisfactory, since it does not seem to me to account 
sufficiently for all facts, and perhaps it is at best only provisionary. 
It explains well the differences which exist between successive faunas, 
but there are also resemblances between these faunas for which it 
offers no explanation. 
‘* All observations and researches of any value agree in proclaiming 
the permanence of species at the present day. The thirty centuries 
which have passed away since the Egyptians embalmed the carcases 
of men and animals, have not in any way influenced the characteristic 
peculiarities of the races which inhabit Egypt. The crocodiles, the 
species of ibis and the ichneumons now living there, are identical in 
specific character with those which so many ages ago trod the banks 
of the Nile. Between the living animal and the mummy there are not 
only no differences in the essential organs, but there are none even in 
the most minute details. . . .. . True it is, indeed, that the changes 
and varieties introduced in domesticated species have been brought 
forward as an argument against this conclusion ; but although such 
changes unquestionably take place m horses, oxen, sheep, pigs and 
goats, and yet more remarkably perhaps in dogs, where the form of 
the cranium becomes modified; yet these very facts appear to me to 
furnish a conclusion totally different from that which it has been 
attempted to draw. The individuals the most widely removed from 
the primitive type never present any real difference of form in the 
important organs. The skeleton always exhibits invariable characters, 
as well with regard to the number of the bones and their apophyses 
as to their relations with one another, while the organs of nutrition, 
the nervous system, and, in short, every distinctive peculiarity of orga- 
