66 RAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 



solely and incessantly to the Vertebrata. In the 

 presence of the facts which this fish has taught us 

 they may, perhaps, be more ready in future to admit 

 the value of observations made in reference to 

 animals so low in the scale of being as worms and 

 zoophytes. Unless we actually deny the evidence 

 of facts, we are compelled at the present day to 

 admit that the representatives of the same type often 

 differ very widely from one anr ,\er, and that their 

 organisation may present very different degrees of 

 perfection and degradation. We must, moreover, here 

 remember what are the facts which anatomy, in ac- 

 cordance with embryology, has taught us in reference 

 to the existence of distinct fundamental types, which 

 are modified in a thousand different ways to engender 

 secondary and tertiary types * ; for by a consideration 

 of these facts we shall find that those systematic 

 conceptions will speedily vanish which have been 

 the means of giving at once so abnormal and false an 

 idea of animated nature. Living beings will then 

 no longer appear to us to be circumscribed within 

 narrow series, which to whatever extent we may 

 suppose them to be multiplied, will still invariably 

 possess the inconvenience of reminding us of a 



Jr o 



straight line. The surface of our globe, like the 

 immensity of the heavens, exhibits to us the creative 

 power under a very different aspect ; for we see it 

 giving development to plants and animals in the same 

 manner as it has produced the stars, distributing 

 them into natural groups as it has reunited the 



* See Chapter II. in Volume I. on the Archipelago of Brehat. 



