THE PROGRESS OP DEGRADATIOJf. 163 



casion that its own presumed claims should have been over- 

 looked ; " where, then, am I V And straightway, in punish- 

 ment of its conceit and rebellion, " its eyes turned to the back 

 of its head." Here is there a story palpably founded on the 

 degradation of misplacement and distortion, which originated 

 ages ere the naturalist had recognised either the term or th(> 

 principle. 



It would be an easy matter for an ingenious theorist, not 

 much disposed to distinguish between the minor and the 

 master laws of organized being, to get up quite as unexcep- 

 tionable a theory of degradation as of development. The 

 one-eyed, one-legged Chelsea pensioner, who had a child, un 

 born at the time, laid to his charge, agreed to recognise his 

 relationship to the little creature, if, on its coming into the 

 world, it was found to have a green patch over its eye, and 

 a wooden leg. And in order to construct a hypothesis of 

 progressive degradation, the theorist has but to take for 

 granted the transmission to other generations of defects and 

 compensatory redundancies at once as extreme and accidental 

 as the loss of eyes or limbs, and the acquisition of timber legs 

 or green patches. The snake, for instance, he might regard 

 as a saurian, that, having accidentally lost its limbs, had exert- 

 ed itself to such account throughout a series of generations, in 

 making up for their absence, as to spin out for itself, by dint 

 of writhing and wriggling, rather more than a hundred ad- 

 ditional vertebrae, and to alter, for purposes of greater flexi- 

 bility, the structure of all the rest. And as fishes, when 

 nearly stunned by a blow, swim for a few seconds on their 

 side, he might regard the flounders as a race of half-stunned 

 fishes, previously degraded by the misplacement of their limbs, 

 that, instead of recovering themselves from the blow given to 

 some remote parent of the family, had expended all their 

 energies in twisting their mouths round to what chanced to 

 be the under side on which they were laid, and their eyes to 



