200 THE LAW. 



genetic ascent in time for the various classes and orders of 

 vitality ; and the rise and progress which geology unfolds 

 has been clearly under the influence of a much more com- 

 plicated law than that which takes order from the force of 

 mere external conditions. Besides, in regarding external 

 conditions as the sole cause of vital diversity, we ascribe to 

 them a task to which they are unequal, and leave altogether 

 unexplained which family of the radiates, for example, and 

 why that family alone, was selected to be transformed into 

 the articulates ; which of the mollusca became the progeni- 

 tors of the fishes ; or which of the fishes, while the others 

 were left uninfluenced in their piscine state, were advanced 

 to the dignity of giving birth to the reptiles. 



If there be any truth in the hypothesis, the highest forms 

 of the lower class must have always given birth to the 

 lowest forms of the next higher class for we can scarcely 

 expect the lower forms to have been endowed with a power 

 which was not permitted to the higher. ISTow, so far from 

 this being geologically true, we find fishes making their 

 appearance in the Silurian rocks ages before molluscan life 

 had attained its culminating point in the oolitic era; so 

 also we find reptiles appearing almost simultaneously with 

 fishes in the old red sandstone, and long before the higher 

 fishes (their natural progenitors, according to this theory) 

 had appeared ; just as birds are found in the new red sand- 

 stone ages before the highest forms of reptiles had come on 

 the stage in the upper secondary series. Here then, the 

 offspring often precedes the parent ; and any line of uni- 

 form development is altogether disproved by the very facts 

 on which the advocates of the Law of Development are 

 attempting to found it. That during the long lapse of 

 geological time there has been rise within each great sub- 

 division of life from lower to higher forms, no one can deny; 

 but the law of this progress is other than that of mere 



