2620 The Zoologist— June, 1871. 



sitting on the backs of chairs and running up stairs on all fours, 

 certainly indicate retrogression quite as much as progression ; 

 they tell us of a tendency downvvards quite as much as a 

 tendency upwards ; and therefore the hypothesis of advance, the 

 idea that every change is a change for the better, must fall to the 

 ground. 



Here another collateral consideration crops up out of the 

 enquiry. How far are we to carry the theory that the existence of 

 a graduated scale or series of allied forms or structures, can be 

 admitted as evidence of lineal descent ? Does it apply to organized 

 beings only ? or does it include the inorganic, the world of 

 minerals ? The mineralogist, the chemist, well know that there are 

 affinities, approximations, gradations, in the Mineral Kingdom, 

 more delicate, more nicely adjusted, more complete, more con- 

 tinuous, than any that have been discovered either in the Animal or 

 Vegetable Kingdoms. This may perhaps be ascribed to the 

 perfect control which man has obtained over the so-called elements, 

 the elementary or inanimate substances with which he deals. 

 I think there are said to be some seventy of these, admitting of 

 combinations almost infinite. The grouping of alkalies, I am told 

 by chemists, is perfectly marvellous. Had Mr. Darwin found such 

 gradations among plants or animals, he could not have failed to 

 conclude that the characters were inherited. The fact of homolo- 

 gous bones or homologous muscles recurring through a long series 

 of animals, with modifications more or less obvious, is more than 

 paralleled, it is eclipsed, by the exquisitely delicate modifications 

 of the inorganic world. A flake of snow exhibits some of these 

 wonders; and every thoroughly-investigated series of cognate sub- 

 stances reveals similar gradations. How then shall we say of the 

 interrupted series, of the broken and mutilated chain of existing 

 animals — and we possess no clew to the recovery of the "missing 

 links" — how shall we say, "Herein is proof of lineal descent; 

 herein is evidence of the transmission of characters from an ancestry 

 of immeasurable antiquity," and then forthwith assert that the more 

 perfect series of inorganic objects has no such teaching; is the 

 mere work of chance ? 



I have given in exleiiso not only Mr. Darwin's own summary of 

 his own views, but also his own summary of the reasoning by which 

 he arrived at those views, and 1 have done this with the determina- 

 tion to place Mr. Darwin before my readers exactly as he would 



