202 RAMBLES AND REVERIES. 



organs the trilobite of course possessed, and Dr. 

 Henry Woodward believes he has found traces of 

 legs ; but these are matters of so indefinite a char- 

 acter that they are not sufficient for the purposes of 

 scientific classification, and, as our readers will be 

 aware, the very term " gill-footed " is unfortunate. 

 Moreover, the highly organised compound eyes of 

 the trilobite demand that it should be placed much 

 higher in the Crustacean scale than that in which 

 the lowly water-fleas are ranged. Nicholson puts it 

 in an order by itself a little lower than the Meros- 

 tomata (king-crab, etc.), and both are regarded by 

 him as lower than the Isopoda (wood-lice). Here 

 for the present it remains, although, if the struc- 

 tures met with in some recent American specimens 

 should turn out to be legs, which Dr. Woodward 

 thinks really are so, but which others regard as only 

 calcic arches, it would probably be necessary to place 

 it in some other position. 



A very large number of species of trilobites have 

 been made. It would be as well if many of them 

 could be unmade, a process which happily seems 

 very probable. Darwin has written an account of 

 the Origin of Species, but who shall give the 

 history of the Manufacture of Species ? Geology, 

 of all the natural sciences, has suffered most from 

 this needless and confusing multiplication of species- 

 This, of course, has partly arisen from the fact that 

 when only fragments of a creature were obtained it 

 was not always possible to determine its characters, 

 and yet it was necessary to give it a name ; but the 

 evil has been aggravated in consequence of the eager- 



