ii6 



FACTS AND FANCIES. 



enormous duration in comparison with the 

 short span of human history, presenting to 

 the naturalist hosts of strange forms which he 

 could scarcely have imagined in his dreams, we 

 may understand how exciting have been these 

 discoveries crowded within the lives of two 

 generations of geologists. Further, when we 

 consider that the general course of this great 

 development of life, beginning with Protozoa 

 and ending with man, is from below upward — 

 from the more simple to the more complex — 

 and that there is of necessity, in this grand 

 growth of life through the ages, a likeness or 

 parallelism to the growth of the individual an- 

 imal from its more simple to its more complex 

 state, we can understand how naturalists should 

 fancy that here they have been introduced to 

 the workshop of Nature, and that they can 

 discover how one creature may have been de- 

 veloped from another by spontaneous evolu- 

 tion. 



Many naturalists like Darwin and HaeckeS, 

 as well as philosophers like Herbert Spencer, 

 are quite carried away by this analogy, and ap- 

 pear unable to perceive that it is merely a gen- 

 eral resemblance between processes altogether 

 different in tiieir nature, and therefore in their 



