NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, 175 



conception receives a remarkable support from the 

 glimpses which we obtain, through the medium of the 

 discoveries of Mr. Macleay, with regard to the affinities 

 and analogies of animal (and by implication vegetable) 

 organisms.* Such a regularity in the structure, as we 

 may call it, of the classification of animals^ as is there 

 beginning to be revealed to us, is totally irreconcilable 

 with the idea of form going on to form merely as needs 

 and wishes in the animals themselves dictated. Had 

 such been the case, all would have been irregular, as 

 things avl^itrary necessarily are. But, lo, the whole 

 plan of being appears to be as symmetrical as the plan 

 of a house, or the laying out of an old-fashioned garden ! 

 This must needs have been devised and arranged for 

 beforehand. And what a preconception or forethought 

 have we here ! For let us only for a moment consider 

 how various are the external physical conditions in 

 which animals live — cHmate, soil, temperature, land, 

 water, air; the peculiarities of food, and the vaiious 

 ways in which it is to be sought ; the peculiar circum- 

 stances in which the business of reproduction and the 

 care-taking of the young are to be attended to : all these 

 requiring to be taken into account, and thousands of 

 animals to be formed suitable in organisation and mental 

 character for the concerns they were to have with these 

 various conditions and circumstances — here a tooth fitted 

 for crushing nuts ; there a claw fitted to serve as a hook 

 for suspension ; here to repress teeth and develop a bony 

 network instead ; tliore to arrange for a bronchial ap- 

 paratus, to last only for a certain brief time; and all 

 these animals were to be schemed out, each as a part of 

 a great range, which was on the whole to be rigidly 

 regular : let us, I say, only consider these things, and 



* These affinities find analogies are explained in the next chapter. 



