430 NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. hi. 



But people in general treated these as mere wild specu- 

 lations, and were content to say that God had created 

 animals, just in the same way as they said that the stars 

 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 fossil 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. 392), 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 sez'enteen species, another thinks that many of these must 

 have come from the same parent, and that only Jive species 

 can be distinguished. Again, among insects, the well-known 

 naturalist, Mr. Bates, has shown that on the Amazons in South 

 America it is oflen 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. 



All the Animals of each Class formed on the same 



