CHAPTER If. 
Lamarck’s Theory of Progression illustrated. — Class of Facts which 
give Color so it.— The Credulity of Undelief. — M. Maillet and his 
Fish-birds. — Gradation not Progress. — Geological Argument. — 
The Present incomplete without the Past. —. Intermediate Links 
of Creation. — Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. — 
The Pterichthys. — Its first Discovery. — Mr. Murchison’s Decision 
regarding it.— Confirmed by that of Agassiz. — Description. — 
The several Varieties of the Fossil yet discovered. — Evidence of 
Violent Death in the Attitudes in which they are found. — The 
Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red. — Description. — Gradations 
from Crustacea to Fishes. — Habits of the Coccosteus. — Scarcely 
any Conception too extravagant for Nature to realize. 
Mr. Lyetw’s brilliant and popular work, The Principles of 
Geology, must have introduced to the knowledge of most of 
my readers the strange theories of Lamarck. The ingenious 
foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts, which 
prove that, to a certain extent, the instincts of species may 
be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a 
lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, 
has concluded that there is a natural progress from the in- 
ferior orders of being towards the superior; and that the off- 
spring of creatures low in the scale in the present time, may 
hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and 
nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descend- 
ants of the ourang-outang, for instance, may be employed in 
some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which 
they shall have to describe the remains of the guadrumana 
as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck himself, when 
bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some huge 
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