U*1TY OP DESIGN. 445 



birds and mammalia, and the Cetacea. between fishes and 

 warm-blooded quadrupeds: for these are but detached links 

 of a broken chain, tending, indeed, to prove the unity of the 

 designs of Nature, but showing also the specific character of 

 each of her creative efforts. The pursuit of remote and 

 often fanciful analogies has. by many of the continental phy- 

 siologists, been carried to an unwarrantable and extravagant 

 length: for the scope which is given to the imagination in 

 these seductive speculations, by leading us far away from the 

 path of philosophical induction, tends rather to obstruct than 

 to advance the progress of real knowledge. By confining 

 our inquiries to more legitimate objects, we shall avoid the 

 delusion into which one of the disciples of this transcenden- 

 tal school appears to have fallen, when he announces, with 

 exultation, that the simple laws he has discovered have now 

 explained the universe;* nor shall we be disposed to lend a 

 patient ear to the more presumptuous reveries of another 

 m-builder, who, by assuming that there exists in or- 

 ganized matter an inherent tendency to perfectibility, fan- 

 cies that he can supersede the operations of Divine agency.t 

 different was the humble spirit of the great New- 

 ton, who, struck with the immensity of nature, compared 

 our knowledge of her operations, into which he had himself 

 penetrated so deeply, to that of a child gathering pebbles on 



* L'univers est expfique, et nous le Toyons; c'est un petit nombre de 

 principes generaux et feconds qui nous en ont donne la clef." Serres, Ann. 

 des Sc. Nat xL 50. 



j- Allusion is here made to the celebrated theory of Lamarck, as exposed 

 in his "Philosophic Zoologique." lie conceives that there was original]? 

 no distinction of species, but that each nee has, in the course of ages, been 

 derived frooa some other, less perfect than itself, by a spontaneous effort at 

 improvement; and he supposes that infusorial animalcules, spontaneously 

 formed out of organic molecules, gave birth, by successive transformations, 

 to all other animals now existing on the globe. He believes that tribes, ori- 

 ginally aquatic, acquired by their own efforts, prompted by their desire to 

 walk, both feet and legs, fitting them for progression on the ground; and 

 that these members, by the long continued operation of the wish to fly, were 

 transformed into wings, adapted to gratify that desire. If this be philoso- 

 phy, H is such as might have emanated from the college of Laputa. 



