PKEADAMITE MAN. 131 



any tendency to such metamorphosis shall have been ob- 

 served; and in respect to this, naturalists, who best should 

 know, and whose judgment should be entitled to respect in 

 the highest degree, following Mr. Darwin, mostly uphold the 

 hypothesis. Imprinted on the pages of the stone-book of 

 geology are found remnants of creatures innumerable, which, 

 so far as the evidence of bones and footprints can go nay 

 of flesh in some rare instances prove that the earth was 

 inhabited in times of unknown date by creatures of which the 

 oldest historical narrative takes no cognisance. 



To persons holding the extreme opinions that the forms in 

 question are mere delusions of the Enemy of man, made to 

 turn up from time to time for no other purpose than to shake 

 our faith and make us doubt, or rather cast aside, the literal 

 authority of holy writ to such as those, of course, the natu- 

 ralist does not address himself. To the majority, who see 

 an existing skeleton, perfect bone by bone, the question will 

 inevitably arise, whether these creatures changed into others 

 as countless ages rolled on, or whether they were extinguished 

 one by one, and new species created. The theory of develop- 

 ment necessarily assumes the former ; and of this theory there 

 have been several modifications. Amongst the naturalists who 

 believed in the faculty of development under one or another 

 of its phases, Maillot and Buifon must be enumerated; but 

 more especially Jean Baptiste Lamarck, whose views were 

 extreme. 



He assumed that all organised beings, no matter how high 

 or how low the form, were progressively developed from par- 

 ticles of similar form and nature. He believed in the exist- 

 ence of a formative substance, that had only to change its 

 form in order to be converted into a new being. Lamarck 

 also believed in spontaneous generation ; a theory that has 

 been newly debated during the last few years. According to 

 him, any soft formless gelatinous mass of organic matter had 

 only to be fermented by surrounding fluids in order to gene- 



