354 DAKWINIANISM. 



egg ? l I daresay he may not be able, either, to find in 

 Darwinianism an explanation of that extraordinary march, 

 once a year, of the millions and millions of land -crabs 

 from the mountains to the far- distant sea ; or of the 

 similar march of the lemmings ; or even of that wonder- 

 fully multitudinous gathering, before flight, of our own 

 swallows, if he had ever witnessed it, or of the flight 

 itself ; or, again, of that salmon that leaps nineteen feet 

 up a waterfall on the Liffey in order to deposit its eggs 

 above it, and then returns down it again to the sea. I 

 fancy he may be struck, too, by what one of the British 

 Association presidents (Sir A. Geikie) tells about there 

 being no resemblance between the lizards of the first of 

 the tertiary formations and the elephants, mastodons, etc., 

 of the last of them. 2 It is possible, also, that Mr. 

 Huxley might not, so unmisgivingly as Darwin, throw 

 into a single unknown x " all the great kingdoms (as 

 Vertebrata, Articulata, etc.)." There might appear to him 

 something even comical in the identifying into a common 

 slump of all these differences fishes, birds, beasts, sponges, 

 insects, worms, what not. To arrive so perfunctorily at 



1 It is curious to think, indeed, that if the hen, over the egg, had 

 cickled always as clamorously as she cackles now, there would, Dar- 

 winianly, by this time, in view of enemies, have been neither the 

 one nor the other neither a hen nor an egg. I have tried to track 

 out the first literary notice of this problem, but not very successfully. 

 Censorinus (De Die Natali, iv. 3), in the middle of the third century 

 after Christ, certainly goes back to Aristotle for the question, avesne 

 ante an ova generata sint ; but it does not appear in A.'s extant works. 

 An earlier reference to the problem itself occurs in Plutarch's 

 Banquet (ii. c. 3), and a later in Macrobius (Saturn, vii. 16). 



2 I fancy myself that that Atlantosaurus of which Geikie speaks 

 the " most colossal animal that ever walked on the earth," not much 

 less than a hundred feet in length and thirty feet or more in height " 

 ought to puzzle him (Huxley) simply as there, quite as much as the 

 Miinoceros tichorhinus could have puzzled Dr. Whewell, "the ency- 

 clopaedic Master of Trinity," as a first. 



