272 NATURAL HISTORY. 



within the scope of a very limited experience, it might 

 safely be inferred that something much greater would be 

 detected, if our range of experience were extended, especi- 

 ally since the world presents us with results which can 

 only be naturally accounted for in this manner.' 



As regards, however, the mode in which species have 

 originated, the writer of the ' Vestiges ' rejects the views 

 of Lamarck altogether, considering his theory as to the 

 cause of varieties (and therefore of species) as 'so far 

 from adequate to account for the facts, that it has had 

 scarcely a single adherent.' In this, the writer of the 

 ' Vestiges ' does less than justice to Lamarck. The special 

 theory of the French naturalist does not fail because it 

 gives 'the adaptive theory too much to do.' It fails 

 because it does not recognise how useful adaptations 

 are preserved and strengthened. It was left to the 

 genius of Charles Darwin to fill this all-important hiatus 

 in the Lamarckian hypothesis. 



The author entirely accepts the conception of a funda- 

 mental unity of organisation among animals ; and regards 

 this as implying ' that all were constructed upon one plan, 

 though in a series of improvements and variations, giving 

 rise to the special forms, and bearing reference to the con- 

 ditions in which each animal lives.' He points out that 

 this underlying unity of organisation is of itself a strong 

 d priori argument against the idea of the separate creation 

 of species. ' Organisms,' he remarks, ' we know to have 

 been produced, not at once, but in the course of a vast 

 series of ages here we now see that they are not a group of 

 individually entire things accidentally associated, but parts 

 of great masses, nicely connected, and integral in their 



