IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE. 259 



lying before me, bearing date 1750, in which I find very 

 nearly the same account given of the origin of animals and 

 plants as that in the " Vestiges," and in which the sea is de- 

 scribed as that great and fruitful womb of nature in which 

 organization and life first began. Lamarck, at the time when 

 Maillet wrote, was a boy in his sixth year. He became, com- 

 Iparatively early in life, a skilful botanist and conchologist ; 

 "jut not until turned of fifty did he set himself to study gene- 

 il zoology ; and his gi*eater work on the invertebrate ani- 

 lals, on which his fame as a naturalist chiefly rests, did not 

 egin to appear, — for it was published serially, — until the 

 ^ear 1815. But this development hypothesis, identical with 



lan. If the skins of these two pachydennata had been preserved in a 

 fossil state, there would have been less resemblance between them than 

 between an Asaphus tyrannus and an Asaphus caudatus. * * * A 

 careful and laborious investigation has discovered, as in the trilobites, a 

 difference in the ammonites of diflferent strata ; but such differences, as 

 in the former case, exist only in the form of the external shell, and may 

 be explained in the same manner. [ ! !] * * * As to the scaphites, 

 baculites, belemnites, and all the other ites which learned ingenuity has 

 80 named, you find them in various strata the same in all important par- 

 ticulars, but also differing slightly in their outward coverings, as might 

 be expected from the different circumstances in which each variety was 

 placed. [! !] The sheep in the warm valleys of Andalusia have a fine 

 covering like to hair ; but remove them to a northern climate, and in a 

 few generations the back is covered with shaggy wool. The animal is 

 the same, — the covering only is changed. * * ♦ The learned have 

 classed those shells under the names of terebratula, orthis, atrypha, pec- 

 ten, &c. They are all much ahke. [! ! !] It requires an experienced 

 eye to distinguish them one from another : what little differences have 

 been pointed out may readily be ascribed, as before, to difference of si- 

 tuation." [! ! !] 



The author of the ** Vestiges," with this, the fundamental portion of 

 his case, granted to him by the Dean, will have exceedingly little diffi- 

 culty in making out the rest for himself. The passage is, however, not 

 without its value, as illustrative of the darkness, in matters of physical 

 science, " even darkness which may be felt," that is suffered to linger, 

 in this the most scientific of ages, in the Church of Buckland, Sedgwick, 

 and Conybeare. 



