250 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



which adapt each existing species of herbivora and carnivora 

 to its own position, place, and state of life. Such contrivances 

 began not with living species ;* the geologist demonstrates their 

 prior existence in the extinct forms of the same genera, which he 

 discovers beneath the surface of the earth, and he claims for the 

 author of these fossil forms under which the first types of such 

 mechanism were embodied, the same high attributes of Wisdom 

 and Goodness, the demonstration of which exalts and sanctifies the 

 labors of Science in her investigations of the living world. 



"The myriads of petrified remains which are disclosed by the 

 researches of geology all tend to prove that our planet has been 

 occupied in times preceding the creation of the human race by 

 extinct species of animals and vegetables made up, like living 

 organic bodies, of clusters of contrivances." It is the description 

 of these " contrivances " which has given to this work and others 

 like it their educational influence. 



While all the books of this sort take special creation for granted, 

 and are based, in one way or another, upon the assumption that 

 fitness involves and implies "contrivance," they did good service 

 to science by keeping clearly and distinctly before the minds of 

 English naturalists the fact that, whatever the reason may be, 

 adaptation or adjustment is the essential characteristic of living 

 beings; that life is adjustment; and that what Aristotle sought to 

 define as the " essence " of a living being, is its fitness for its place 

 in nature. 



As the facts of embryology and paleontology and geography 

 began to press for explanation, and it became more and more 

 obvious, during the first part of the nineteenth century, that species 

 must owe their origin to some influence which is part of the dis- 

 coverable order of nature, it is due to the writers on natural theology 

 that the English naturalists repudiated all inadequate attempts, 

 like that of Lamarck, and, maintaining a sturdy suspense, waited 

 for some more adequate explanation. 



Huxley says that in conversation with Herbert Spencer in 1852 

 and the years following, he himself took the ground that no sug- 

 gestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which 

 had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena ; 

 and Darwin's "Letters" show that his point of view was at first 



