152 THE PLACOID BRAIN. 



But why introduce the element of embryonic progress into 

 this question at all ? It is not a question of embryonic pro- 

 gress. The very legerdemain of the sophist, — the juggling 

 by which he substitutes his white balls for black, or converts 

 his pigeons into crows, — consists in the art of attaching the 

 conclusions founded on the facts or conditions of one suV- 

 ject, to some other subject essentially distinct in its nature. 

 Gestation is not creation. The history of the young of animals 

 in their embryonic state is simply the history of the foetax 

 young ; just as the history of insect transformation, in which 

 it has been held by good men, but weak reasoners, that there 

 exists direct evidence of the doctrine of the Resurrection, is 

 the history of insect transformation, and of nothing else. 

 True, the human mind is so constituted that it converts all 

 nature into a storehouse of comparisons and analogies ; and 

 this fact of the metamorphosis of the creeping caterpillar, 

 after first passing through an intermediate period of apparent 

 death as an inert aurelia, into a winged imago, seems to 

 have seized on the human fancy at a very early age, as won- 

 derfully illustrative of life, death, and the future state. The 

 Egyptians wrapped up the bodies of their dead in the chrysalis 

 form, so that a mummy, in their apprehension, was simply a 

 human pupa, waiting the period of its enlargement ; and the 

 Greeks had but one word in their language for butterfly and 

 the soul. But not the less true is it, notwithstanding, that 

 the facts of insect transformation furnish no legitimate key 

 to the totally distinct facts of a resurrection of the body, and 

 of a life after death. And on what principle, then, are we 

 to trace the origin of past dynasties in the changes of the 

 foetus, if not the rise of the future dynasty in the transfor- 

 mations of the caterpillar 1 " These (embryonic) characters," 

 — that of the heterocercal tail, and of the mouth of the ordi- 

 nary shark type, — " are essential and important," remarks the 

 author of the "Vestiges," "whatever the Edinburgh Ee- 



