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concur with the variations in the eye, said to be accidental, so as 

 to result ultimately in its present perfection ? Just as you like, 

 or anything else you please. If my superior intellect cannot see 

 through all such arguments as these, I should not have the good 

 opinion of it that I have at present, and mean to have. 

 Pr'ythee say no more ! It's only a waste of breath. Let well 

 alone. 



I believe that we are descended from a monkey, as aforesaid, 

 because, among other reasons, we have a small part of the top 

 of the lobe of the ear raised just as the monkey has. You tell 

 me that Mr. Frank Buckland has shewn that the monkey has it 

 not. What of that? Who was Mr. Frank Buckland but the son 

 of his father, I should like to know ! and have I not already said, 

 in other words, that his father was not fit to hold a candle to me ? 

 " Like father, like son," you know. Buckland me no Buckland ! 



I believe too, for I cannot deny, that no animal has ever 

 existed for a longer space of time, nor any ever been more 

 widely dispersed, than the extinct Mammoth, and yet that the 

 character of the molar teeth in it are persistently the same in the 

 earliest-known and the most recent of the species. It existed, 

 too, in such numbers that no less than two thousand of these 

 teeth were dredged up on the coast of Norfolk alone, between 

 the years 1820 and 1832, while the great plains of Siberia are 

 partly composed of them and of sand, each tooth weighing from 

 150 to 200 pounds, this quarry having served the people with 

 lime for five hundred years, besides an export to Europe for 

 upwards of an hundred, and yet the supply is undiminished. 

 But although I have all along contended that such influences of 

 time and space make species unstable, I cannot allow that this 

 wonderful stability at all overturns my theory. Sir Charles 

 Lyall was therefore altogether in the wrong when he spoke, you 

 tell me, of each species having been * endowed at the time of its 

 creation" with its present attributes, neither the Mammoth 

 nor man having ever yet had any predecessor discovered by 

 Geological research. He did, did he? I think nothing of him 

 or liis opinion. " Happy man be his dole." He had his 

 opinion and I have mine. No doubt both can't be right. I 

 allow that. I want nothing but what's fair; but if only one 



