REY. JOHN GERARD, F.L.S., ON SPECIES AND THEIR ORIGIN. 127 
ancient civic train-bands, still enjoys the privilege of marching 
through the City of London with bayonets fixed, band playing, 
and colours flying. Notable relics of the past are likewise fur- 
nished by inter-regimental feuds, sometimes bearing witness to 
very long memories. It is said, for instance, that one of these 
dates from the massacre of Glencoe, in 1692, the corps, repre- 
senting respectively its victims and its actual perpetrators, 
being still ready to come to blows, more than two centuries later. 
It is unnecessary to indicate in how many points analogy may 
be discovered between those bodies which are styled regiments, 
and those termed “species” of plants or animals. The latter, 
like the former, are distinguished each by its own garb or 
uniform, and never did the most exacting of martinets insist so 
rigorously upon the right number of buttons or cut and tint of 
facings on a soldier’s coat as does Nature in every minutest 
particular whereby her several cohorts may be distinguished, and 
manifold are the features which seem unmistakably to argue a 
real continuity of life persisting through changes which 
might appear altogether to separate newer forms from old. 
It is of course proverbial that comparisons are always 
defective, and that which we have used is no exception to the 
rule; but one truth at least it serves to illustrate, that a number 
of individuals being stamped with a common characteristic 
linking them together as a distinctive group, this may have a 
detinite historyincluding modifications and transformations which 
might appear altogether to alter its character. The question to 
be asked is therefore not quite so idle as that which we have heard 
as to whether there can or cannot be variations in the resem- 
blance of closely allied animals, the relations of those which 
we term members of a species being clearly subject to a law 
imposed upon them all. 
The real problem, therefore, is to determine, What is the 
power, influence or law, which makes such original groups what 
they are, and invests each of their members with those common 
characters which our mind naturally recognizes, and so proceeds 
to classify individuals as included in one species, or species in 
one genus. 
This is, in fact, the root of the matter. Far more vital than 
the question whether species can be transformed is the previous 
question, How came they to be constituted? To what do they 
owe their genesis? As we have been told by Mr. Lewes, the 
relations of resemblance linking together the individuals of a 
species are real relations—there is a reality indicated by each 
term. What, then, is the cause of this reality, that to which 
