226 SYSTEM OF LIVING FOKMS. 



right ; while others may be driven forward with equal vio- 

 lence, and reach their destined haven in an apparently irreg- 

 ularly short period of time. Of course no one would con- 

 sider the diversities in the fates and successes of these different 

 vessels, or the fact that some were for a time driven back- 

 ward, that some were lost outright, and that others were 

 driven forward with a velocity which seemed to set all idea 

 of a regularly graduated motion at defiance, as any proof 

 against a general law of progression, as applied to the sailing 

 of ships from port to port, but the proof would, upon the 

 whole, be the reverse. 



Allow these ships, then, to represent an equal number of 

 Divine archetypes, or pre-existing ideal * forms of creation, so 

 to speak, which set out, at one and the same time, upon 

 the voyage of progressive development, all being bound to 

 one haven, viz.. the realization of the clothing of an exterior 

 form ; the diversities in their movements, presented in the 

 retardations and temporary retrogressions of some, and the 

 fi-tful and apparently preternatural accelerations of others, as 

 owing to the various currents and counter-currents of outer 

 influences, no more disprove the law of general progression, 

 with reference to them, than similar diversities of movement 

 prove the same thing with reference to the ships. When we, 

 therefore, find a few local examples of vertebral fishes among 

 some of the strata of the first series of fossiliferous rocks, or 

 when we find, in one or two instances, the remains t)f a 

 diminutive air-breathing reptile, in an upper member of the 

 Old Red Sandstone series, where, as it is stated, such have 

 recently been found;* or when, in human history, we find 

 examples of whole nations and races remaining apparently 

 stationary for thousands of years, while others have, at early 

 * See Edinburgh Philosophical Journal for April, 1852, pp. 853-4. 



