BARON CUVIER. 



81 



liaving certain wants, has not the power of satisfying 

 them ; a being which could have a part of its organiza- 

 tion aUied to another part, suited to a different being, an 

 intermediate being, in fact, that which is called a passage. 



" Each being is made for itself, and in itself is complete : 



it may resemble other beings, each equally composed of what 



is fit ifor it, but none can be composed with a view to another, 



nor to join it to a third by affinity of form ; and that which 



is true of the least plant, of the least animal ; that which is 



true of the most perfect of animals, man ; of the little world, 



as the ancient philosophers called it, is necessarily not the 



less true of the great world, the globe, and all its inhabitants. 



The beings which compose it, and which people it, contri- 



*bute to its existence ; they are necessary to each other, and 



to the whole : they have been so since this existence has 



subsisted ; they will be as long as it shall subsist. The 



world is Uke an individual, all its parts act on each other : 



we can imagine other worlds more or less rich, more or less 



peopled, the preservation of which rests on other means ; 



but we cannot conceive the present world deprived of one 



or several of the classes of beings which inhabit it, any more 



of the body of man deprived of one or several of its systems 



of organs. 



•' There is, then, in the world, as in the body of man, 

 that which is necessary, and nothing more. What law 

 could have obliged the Creator unnecessarily to produce use- 

 less forms, merely to fill up the vacancies in a scale, which 

 is only a speculation of the mind, and which has no other 

 foundation than the beauty which some philosophers dis- 

 cover in it ? But in every thing beauty consists in relative 

 fitness : the beauty of the world is formed by the happy 

 concourse of beings which compose it, in their mutual preser- 

 vation, and in that of the whole, and not in the facility 

 which a naturalist may find in arranging them into a 

 simple series. 



"Nevertheless, to the hypothesis of a continued scale in 

 the forms of beings, other philosophers have added that in 

 which all beings are modifications of one only : or, that they 

 have been produced successively, and by the developement 

 of one first germ ; and it is on this that an identity of com- 

 position for ail has been engrafted. . . This system (as it 



