144 SPECIES NOT 



the* same at the time when crustaceans, endowed 

 with the faculty of vision, were first placed at 

 the bottom of the primeval seas, as at the present 

 moment. 



Thus we find among the earliest organic re- 

 mains an optical instrument of most curious con- 

 struction, adapted to produce vision of a peculiar 

 kind, in the then existing representatives of one 

 great class in the articulated division of the 

 animal kingdom. We do not find this instrument 

 passing onwards, as it were, through a series of 

 experimental changes from more simple into more 

 complex forms; it was created at the very first, 

 in the fulness of perfect adaptation to the uses 

 and condition of the class of creatures to which 

 this kind of eye has ever been, and is still, 

 appropriate." 



Mr. Darwin tells us, "from fossil species we can 

 learn nothing." Two of the most distinguished 

 paleontologists and comparative anatomists of the 

 present age tell us that the highest known animal 

 in the oldest geological stratum, in the daun. 

 in fact, of Creation, possessed an eye precisely 

 similar in every respect to animals of the same 

 class living in our seas. Not in a class which 

 has become nearly extinct by' -the "struggle for 

 existence," but one which out-numbers by myriads 

 every animal living out of water put together! 

 If "natural selection" has modified the eye of the 

 crustacean into one of a higher grade, surely, 

 according to Mr. Darwin's theory, the less favoured 

 original species ought to be disappearing from the 



