275 FINAL CAUSES : THEIR BEARING 



to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in 

 our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bear- 

 ing wood, — a fish's skull or tooth, — the vertebra of a reptile, 

 — the humerus of a bird, — the jaw of a quadruped, — all, any 

 of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, 

 become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory : 

 the puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible 

 a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old ; and 

 our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, " heaps upon heaps," 

 before it. 



There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which 

 this special scheme of development does not agree. To every 

 truth, too, really such, from which the antagonist scheme de- 

 rives its shadowy analogies, it leaves its full value. It has 

 no quarrel with the facts of even the " Vestiges," in their 

 character as realities. There is certainly something very ex- 

 traordinary in that foetal progress of the human brain on 

 which the assertors of the development hypothesis have found- 

 ed so much. Nature, in constructing this curious organ, first 

 lays down a grooved cord, as the carpenter lays down the 

 keel of his vessel ; and on this narrow base the perfect brain, 

 as month after month passes by, is gradually built up, like 

 the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain 

 closely resembling that of a fish ; a few additions more con- 

 vert it into a brain undistinguishable from that of a reptile ; 

 a few additions more impart to it the perfect appearance of 

 the brain of a bird ; it then developes into a brain exceed- 

 ingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped ; and, finally, 

 expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply-coiTUgated lobes, 

 till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique 

 character as a human brain. Radically such from the lirst, 

 it passes towards its full development through all the inferior 

 forms, from that of the fish upwards, — thus comprising, dur- 

 ing its foetal progress, an ejDitome of geologic history, as if 



