286 fixAL CAUSES : their bearing 



had no place among tliem in their monarchical state ? Th« 

 fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata 

 by their homocercal tails, — the fishes {Acanthopterygii and 

 Sub-hracJiiati) with their four limbs slung in a belt round 

 their necks, — the flat fishes (Pleuronectidce), that, in addition 

 to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one 

 eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the 

 other is thrust out to its edge, — the irregular fishes generally 

 (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) — were not introduced 

 into the ichthyic division until after the full development of 

 the reptile dynasty ; nor did the hand that makes no slips in 

 its working " form the crooked serpent," footless, grovelling, 

 venom- bearing, — the authorized type of a fallen and degraded 

 creature, — untilafterthe introduction of the mammals. What 

 can this fact of degradation mean ? Species and genera seem 

 to be greatly more numerous in the pi-esent age of the world 

 than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the 

 extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place, 

 — not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher 

 divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the 

 interpolations of lower links into the previously existing di- 

 visions, — may have borne reference to some predetermined 

 scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the 



poet, 



'* Of general Obder since the whole began ?" 



May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one 

 of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, 

 and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been origi- 

 nally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of in- 

 numerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms 1 Such, 

 certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame 

 Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest ; but the geologist has 

 learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at 

 least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot pos- 



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