I50 



VESTIGES OF THE 



of abortive or rudimentary organs condemns it ; for these, 

 on such a supposition, could be regarded in no other Hght 

 than as blemishes or blunders — the thing of all others 

 most irreconcilable with that idea of Almighty Perfection 

 which a general view of nature so irresistibly conveys. On 

 the other hand, when the organic creation is admitted to 

 have been effected by a general law, we see nothing in 

 these abortive parts but harmless peculiarities of develop- 

 ment, and interesting evidences of the manner in which 

 the Divine Author has been pleased to work. 



We have yet to advert to the most interesting class of 

 facts connected with organic development. It is only 

 in recent times that physiologists have observed that 

 each animal passes, in the course of its germinal history, 

 through a series of changes resembling the inrmmuid 

 forms, first of the various orders inferior to it in the 

 entire scale, and then of its own order. This is a depart- 

 ment of natural history in which only a few facts have 

 been collected ; but these are of such a nature, that we 

 cannot doubt of their being the indications of some 

 great general law. Thus, for instance, the comatula, a 

 free-swimming star-fish, is, at one stage of its early 

 progress, a crinoid — that is, a star-fish fixed upon a stalk 

 to the bottom of the sea. It advances from the form of 

 one of the lower to that of one of the higher echinoder- 

 mata. The animals of its first form were, as we have 

 seen, among the most abundant in the earliest fossili- 

 ferous I'ocks : they began to decline in the new red sand- 

 stone era, and they w^ere succeeded in the oolitic age by 

 animals of the form of tlie mature comatula. Thus, too, 

 the insect, standing at the head of the articulated 

 animals, is, in the larva state, an annelid or worm, the 

 annelida being the lowest in the same class. The higher 

 Crustacea, as the crab or lobster, at their escape from the 



