280 DARWINIAN1SM. 



qualities or homogeneous quantities. Much more, then, 

 must there be consideration of such limits when the 

 question is of heterogeneous entities, and of hetero- 

 geneous entities, different structures, that are organised 

 and live. Mr. Darwin pointedly derives all the great 

 kingdoms, the one from the other that certainly with 

 Haeckel in the end, if, as to Lyell, only with modest 

 guardedness in the beginning. On this authority we 

 are to conceive, then, that we can very well reach a man 

 from a sponge by gradation of structure ! Similarly 

 the liver may be regarded as but a transformed heart, 

 or, vice versa possibly, the heart as but a transformed 

 liver ; at the same time that the competing claims of 

 kidney, prostrate, or uterus are righteously not to be 

 ignored. A cocoa-nut is but a big cherry stone; and 

 /si Oken is sure that the teeth are but the toes of the 

 / |/ head. "Mammary glands/^ says Nicholson""(p. 568), 

 " are regarded by Huxley as an extreme modification of 

 the cutaneous sebaceous follicles." These are sebaceous 

 follicles, the little black pin's points which, detected at 

 times on cheek or brow, fair fingers may elect, as 

 "black heads," to express. Such huge udder, with its 

 half-dozen dugs, and the pin's point of a " black head " 

 side by side, must we not admire the modest fortitude 

 that can name their modification only " extreme " ? 



So, by simple gradation it is also that an eye is an 

 eye ! Lyell (ii. 207) notices this : " the formation of the 

 eye by such variations as those of which a cattle- 

 breeder avails himself ! " He would be a clever cattle- 

 breeder who would know where to begin what knob 

 to catch at, what dimple to dip into. And yet (ii. 339 

 and iii. 25) " our ignorance is so profound, why one 

 form is preserved with nearly the same structure, or 

 advances in organisation, or retrogades, or becomes 

 extinct " (for all is at the bidding of natural accident 



