38 Charles Robert Darwin. 



ing. It is a mere excuse for a foregone conclusion. It 

 is dumb in the presence of such facts as the existence of 

 rudimentary hind legs in certain snakes, their absence in 

 the great majority. Were God " so anxious for the type," 

 he would at least have brought it out in the majority of 

 cases. He would not have made the modern horse with 

 three toes (the shank and splints), earlier horses with four., 

 and still earlier with five, one of them rudimentary. Such 

 a progression overwhelmingly suggests organic evolution, 

 while the doctrine of ideal types finds in it not a particle 

 of confirmation. 



Another argument for organic evolution is the geological ; 

 viz., that no highly organized plant or animal occurs in the 

 lower strata. This is the argument from temporal distri- 

 bution. The argument from special distribution is one that 

 Darwin has made peculiarly his own. Indeed, it was the 

 argument which first impressed him with the general truth 

 of natural selection. It is that differences of structure 

 correspond to the degrees of separateness of local origin. 

 The opposing continents have the widest differences, the 

 continents and adjacent islands the next widest, and so on. 

 So, too, the sea plants and animals on the opposite sides of 

 a continent are most unlike. Is not the lesson of these 

 facts so plain that a wayfaring man, though a fool, may not 

 err therein ? What can they mean if not that degrees of 

 resemblance mean degrees of special adaptation ? Not an 

 oceanic island situated more than three hundred miles from 

 land has a mammal except the bat. The special-creationist 

 would ask us to believe that God created here the only 

 mammal that could get here of his own free motion ! Also 

 that on certain oceanic islands he has placed certain plants 

 with hooks ingeniously adapted to catch the hair of pass- 

 ing quadrupeds and so disseminate their seeds. But the 

 quadrupeds are wanting. Why but because the seeds could 

 blow but the quadrupeds could not swim so far ? 



Last, but not least, we have the argument from embryol- 

 ogy, — the condition of the young of various creatures pre- 

 vious to their birth. Take man for an example. In the earli- 

 est stages of his foetal life he cannot be distinguished from 

 an incipient plant. Later he cannot be distinguished from 

 the lowest animals ; still later, when his vertebrate condi- 

 tion is determined, it cannot be said whether he is snake or 

 fish or bird. When it is evident that he is to be a mammal, 



