458 NINETEENTH CENTURY. FT. in, 



were created by Him, without pausing to consider how He 

 has created them. 



Since the time of Buffon and Linnaeus, however, many 

 new facts had gradually been brought to light about living 

 animals ; and foss*il species had been dug out of the earth, 

 showing that many different forms had lived upon our globe, 

 one after the other ; and these new discoveries led naturalists 

 to speculate whether some clue might not be found to 

 explain this long succession of living beings. 



Then again, as naturalists spread all over the world and 

 many new forms of animals and plants became known, it 

 was found to be more and more difficult to separate the 

 different species and to say which are and which are not 

 descendants of one parent. Linnaeus, as we have seen 

 (p. 208), pointed this out in the case of plants, and wild 

 roses are a very good example of it ; for the different kinds 

 run so much into each other, that while one of our best 

 botanists has divided them into seventeen species^ another 

 thinks that many of these must have come from the same 

 parent, and that only five species can be distinguished. 

 Again, among insects, the well-known naturalist, Mr. Bates, 

 has shown us that on the Amazons in South America it is 

 often impossible to tell, among some families of butterflies, 

 which are the same species and which keep apart from 

 each other. Facts like these, of the relationship of living 

 beings, had long been forcing themselves upon naturalists, 

 and this was one of the reasons given by Lamarck for 

 supposing animals to be all descended from a few simple 

 forms. 



Another reason was that curious agreement in the 

 bones of different animals which had become more and 

 more noticed ever since the time of John Hunter, and which 

 Geoffrey St.-Hilaire insisted upon so strongly. Why should 



