300 DARWINIANISM. 



no wise alter genera ! " Nor yet have they been altered 

 in the recorded memory of man. Whatever they may 

 have been in the all-unknown, they are fixed now, and 

 so have been always fixed, let us go back further than 

 Rome, Greece, Egypt, India, China to the " old artist " 

 in the ice-age, or even beyond it if we can. Some two 

 thousand five hundred years are not a yesterday ; but 

 when Solon, so long ago, referred to cocks, pheasants, and 

 peacocks as ten thousand times more beautiful than the 

 enthroned Croesus in his robes, the said cocks, pheasants, 

 and peacocks were manifestly pretty well the same cocks, 

 pheasants, and peacocks that they are now. Of man or 

 beast the relics of Pompeii monotonously bring to us only 

 identity, and not one jot less the buried mummies that 

 were gorgeously alive in Egypt centuries and centuries 

 earlier. It has been already noted that the same dung- 

 beetle that Mr. Darwin saw, Aristotle had already seen two 

 thousand two hundred years before him. The latter could 

 ask in his day, and we may ask in ours, why the nails of 

 the fingers grow so much faster than the nails of the toes ? 

 why oil poured upon the sea composes it ? why one end 

 of an egg is harder than the other ? or why olvov oiva) 

 Sid\ve<r6ai (" a hair of the dog," etc.) ? He could tell us, 

 too, that the Athenian boys knew how to quaver through 

 paper on a reed, just as ours do ; and no doubt the boys 

 then, as they came out of the theatre from the repre- 

 sentation of the " Frogs," shouted out, as they leaped 

 over each others' backs, brekekekex, coax, coax, brekekekex, 

 coax, coax, just as we may have known boys in London, 

 or Liverpool, or elsewhere, similarly to leap and similarly 

 to shout. 1 



1 By the " old artist " of course we mean him who sketched animals 

 on horn 240,000 years ago, as Darwinians assert. That old artist, 

 evidently, was essentially the same human being that we are. If he 

 could sketch them on horn, he had, doubtless, his dog then too. 



