THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE. 141 



closely connected with ruminants) has well-developed 

 teeth in its upper jaw; so that here is another in- 

 stance of organs well developed and very useful, in one 

 animal, represented by rudimentary organs, for which we 

 can discover no purpose whatsoever, in another closely 

 allied animal. The whalebone whale, again, has horny 

 " whalebone " plates in its mouth, and no teeth ; but 

 the young foetal whale, before it is born, has teeth in 

 its jaws; they, however, are never used, and they never 

 come to anything. But other members of the group to 

 which the whale belongs have well-developed teeth in 

 both jaws. 



Upon any hypothesis of special creation, facts of this 

 kind appear to me to be entirely unaccountable and 

 inexplicable, but they cease to be so if you accept 

 Mr. Darwiu's hypothesis, and see reason for believing 

 that the whalebone whale and the whale with teeth in 

 its mouth both sprang from a whale that had teeth, 

 and that the teeth of the foetal whale are merely rem- 

 nants — recollections, if we may so say — of the extinct 

 whale. So in the case of the horse and the rhino- 

 ceros : suppose that both have descended by modification 

 from some earlier form which had the normal number 

 of toes, and the persistence of the rudimentary bones 

 which no longer support toes in the horse becomes 

 comprehensible. 



In the language that we speak in England, and in 

 the lanjmase of the Greeks, there are identical verbal 

 roots, or elements entering into the composition of 

 words. That fact remains unintelligible so long as we 

 suppose English and Greek to be independently created 

 tongues ; but when it is shown that both languages are 



