114 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



degraded into their present useless condition, 

 are the record of a former state of things and have 

 been retained solely through the power of inherit- 

 ance. They may be compared with the letters in a 

 word still retained in the spelling, but become use- 

 less in pronunciation, but which serve as a clue for 

 its derivation. On the view of descent with modifi- 

 cation, we may conclude that the existence of 

 organs in a rudimentary, imperfect and useless con- 

 dition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a 

 strange difficulty, as they assuredly do on the old 

 doctrine of creation, might even have been antici- 

 pated in accordance with the views here ex- 

 plained." ' 



Considering, then, these wonderful homologies, 

 of which but brief mention has been made, and pon- 

 dering over the problems raised by the existence of 

 rudimentary or vestigial organs, in such a large por- 

 tion of the animal kingdom, what inference are we 

 to draw from the point of view of science ? " What 

 now," demands Spencer, " can be the meaning of 

 this community of structure among these hundreds 

 of thousands of species filling the air, burrowing in 

 the earth, swimming in the water, creeping among 

 the sea-weed, and having such enormous differences 

 of size, outline and substance, that no community 

 would be suspected between them ? Why, under 

 the down-covered body of the moth, and under the 

 hard wing-cases of the beetle, should there be discov- 

 ered the same number of divisions as in the calcare- 



; The Origin of Species," vol. II, p. 263. 



