244 THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS IN ITS 

 EMBKYONIC STATE. 



OLDER THAN ITS ALLEGED FOUNDATIONS. 



When Maillet first promulgated his hypothesis, many of the 

 departments of natural history existed as mere regions of 

 fable and romance ; and, in addressing himself to the Mitsco' 

 dins of Paris, in a popular work as wild and amusing as a 

 fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, and he did take it 

 very freely, of exaggerating the marvellous, and adding fresh 

 fictions to the untrue. And in preparing them for his theory 

 of the metamorphoses of a marine into a terrestrial vegeta- 

 tion, he set himself, in accordance with his general character, 

 to show that really the transmutation did not amount to much. 

 " I know you have resided a long time," his Indian Philoso- 

 pher is made to say, " at Marseilles. Now, you can bear me 

 witness, that the fishermen there daily find in their nets, and 

 among their fish, plants ot a hundred kinds, with their fruits 

 still upon them ; and though these fruits are not so large and 

 so well nourished as those of our earth, yet the species of 

 these plants is in no other respect dubious. They there find 

 clusters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, 

 prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. "When in 

 that city, I saw, in the cabinet of a curious gentleman, a pro- 



