DARWINISM AND VIVISECTION 219 



need hardly be stated that these would not all be 

 considered of equal force ; some even might be 

 ridiculed as trivial, but many were such as carried 

 much with them to strengthen him in the standpoint 

 he felt himself driven to occupy. 



The following brief extracts from his writings on 

 this question may be enough to show the general 

 drift of his arguments in dealing with the subject ; 

 more than this need not here be touched upon. In 

 one of the pamphlets on the subject, already alluded 

 to, he says : 



" The result of this startling theory, if carried to 

 its legitimate extent, is, then, that not only species 

 but genera, not only genera but orders, not only 

 orders but classes, all classes under which the crea- 

 tures have been hitherto arranged by naturalists in 

 all ages, were but one and the same originally, had 

 one common source of being in some one first 

 parent or pair of parents ; that the lion and the 

 lamb, the hawk and the eel, the humming-bird and 

 the spider, the butterfly and the toad, had all one 

 single original from which they at first sprang, and 

 that they have only assumed their present forms 

 through tendencies which, making use of fortuitous 

 advantages, acted upon individuals of the gradually 

 increasing types of forms in the various ages of 

 their existence. Nay, not only so, but that even 

 man himself, as well as the so-called species of crea- 

 tures, had one and the same ancestry." 



He reasoned that it is no argument in the way of 

 proof that because certain species supposed to be 



