OF CREATION 387 



danger, and an admirably contrived chambered habi- 

 tation the fish had its strong defence of enamelled 

 scales. Nor were the corals, the cuttle-fish, the crust- 

 aceans, or the fishes of after times at all more highly 

 organized in these respects.* 



And such is the case throughout. The reptiles 

 which first appeared belonged to groups more com- 

 plicated in their organization than many of those 

 which succeeded them. In all ancient forms of ani- 

 mals, also, as in their existing analogues, there is 

 adaptation as well as development. These two great 

 principles proceeded, it would seem, hand in hand, 

 side by side, carrying out the great plan sketched 

 from the beginning. Wherever there was room for 

 an animal or vegetable of a certain kind, there that 

 animal or vegetable was introduced, bearing its mark 

 as belonging to a special group, and exhibiting the 

 closest resemblance to some other organic form, filling 

 elsewhere, or at another time, the same office. There 

 is, however, very rarely any absolute identity of spe- 

 cific form in the individuals or groups characteristic 

 of times or places removed by a great interval. 



There is hardly any fact in natural history more 

 distinctly the result of observation, or more valuable 

 as suggesting a great law of nature, than the strictly 

 co-ordinate relation which space and time bear to 

 development in organic existence. In the compara- 

 tive repose of the open sea, on a calm day, in deep 

 water, we find floating on and near the surface my- 



* Still, it must not be forgotten that there is in the structure of some of 

 these animals, and especially the fishes, a singular limitation to what is 

 now the character of the corresponding species at an early period of the 

 development of the individual. 



s 2 



