THE MEANING OF HOMOLOGY 29 



according to the same fundamental plan, with 

 marrow-filled backbones and exactly two pairs of 

 limbs branching in the same way, is an astonishing 

 coincidence. That the wing of the bird, the fore- 

 leg of the dog, the flipper of the whale, and the 

 fore-limb of the toad and crocodile, have essentially 

 the same bones as the human arm has is a fact 

 which may be without significance to blind men, 

 but to no one else. The metamorphosis of the 

 frog from a fish, of the insect from a worm, and of 

 a poet from a senseless cell, are transformations 

 simply marvellous in meaning. And it is not 

 easy, since Darwin, to understand how such lessons 

 could remain long unintelligible, even to stones 

 and simpletons. Not many generations have 

 passed, however, since these revelations, now so 

 distinct and wonderful, fell on the listless minds 

 of men as ineffectually as the glories of the flower 

 fall on the sightless sockets of the blind. 



It is hardly two generations since the highest 

 intelligences on the earth conceived that not 

 only the different varieties of men — the black, the 

 white, and the orange — but all the orders and 

 genera of the animal world, and not only animals, 

 but plants, had all been somehow simultaneously 

 and arbitrarily brought into existence in some 

 indistinct antiquity, and that they had from the 

 beginning all existed with practically the same 

 features and in approximately the same conditions 

 as those with which and in which they are found 

 to-day. The universe was conceived to be a fixed 

 and stupid something, born as we see it, incapable 



