34 THE HISTORY OF CREATION, 
for the knowledge of the earliest paleontological conditions 
of development, just because no petrified remains of the 
most ancient conditions of the development of tribes and 
classes have been preserved. These, indeed, could not have 
been preserved on account of the soft and tender nature of 
their bodies. No petrifactions could inform us of the funda- 
mental and important fact which ontogeny reveals to us, 
that the most ancient common ancestors of all the different 
animal and vegetable species were quite simple cells like 
the egg-cell. No petrifaction could prove to us the im- 
mensely important fact, established by ontogeny, that the 
simple increase, the formation of cell-aggregates and the 
differentiation of those cells, produced the infinitely mani- 
fold forms of multicellular organisms. Thus ontogeny helps 
us over many and large gaps in paleontology. 
To the invaluable records of creation furnished by 
paleontology and ontogeny are added the no less important 
evidences for the blood relationship of organisms furnished 
by comparative anatomy. When organisms, externally 
very different, nearly agree in their internal structure, one 
may with certainty conclude that the agreement has its 
foundation in Inheritance, the dissimilarity its foundation 
in Adaptation. Compare, for example, the hands and fore 
paws of the nine different animals which are represented 
on Plate IV.,in which the bony skeleton in the interior of the 
hand and of the five fingers is visible. Everywhere we find, 
though the external forms are most different, the same bones, 
and among them the same number, position, and connection. 
It will perhaps appear very natural that the hand of man 
(Fig. 1) differs very little from that of the gorilla (Fig. 2) and 
of the orang-outang (Fig. 8), his nearest relations. Butit will 
