164 THE PROGRESS OF DEGRADATION. 



what chanced to be the upper, and that made their pectorais 

 serve for anal and dorsal fins, and their anal and dorsal fins 

 serve for pectorals. But while we must recognise in nature 

 certain laws of disturbance, if I may so speak, through which, 

 within certain limits, traits which are the result of habit or cir- 

 cumstance in the parents are communicated to their offspring, 

 we would err as egregiously, did we take only these into ac- 

 count, without noting that infinitely stronger antagonist law 

 of reproduction and restoration which, by ever gravitating to- 

 wards the original type, preserves the integrity of races, as the 

 astronomer would, who, in constructing his orrery, recognised 

 only that law of propulsion through which the planets speed 

 through the heavens, without taking into account that anta- 

 gonist law of gravitation which, by maintaining them in their 

 orbits, insures the regularity of their movements. The law 

 of restoration would recover and right the stunned fish laid 

 on its side ; the law of reproduction would give limbs to the 

 offspring of the mutilated saurian. We have evidence, in the 

 extremeness of the degradation in these cases, that it cannot 

 be a degradation hereditarily derived from accident. Nature 

 is, we find, active, not in perpetuating the accidental wooden 

 legs and green patches of ancestors in their descendants, but 

 in restoring to the offspring the true limbs and eyes which 

 the parents have lost. It is, however, not with a theory of 

 hereditary degradation, but with a hypothesis of gradual deve- 

 lopment, that I have at present to deal ; and what I have to 

 establish as proper to the present stage of my argument is, 

 that this principle of degradation really exists, and that the 

 history of its progress in creation bears directly against the 

 assumption that the earlier vertebrata were of a lower type 

 than the vertebrata of the same ichthyic class which exist now. * 



* It will scarce be urged against the degradation theory, that those 

 races which, tried by the tests of defect or misplacement of pai-ts, we 

 deem degraded, are not less fitted for carrying on what in their own littk 



