34 THE HISTOEY OF CREATION. 



for the knowledge of the earliest palceontological conditions 

 of development, just because no petrified remains of the 

 most ancient conditions of the development of tribes and 

 classes have been preserved. . These, indeed, could not have 

 been preserved on account of the soft and tender nature of 

 their bodies. No petrifactions could inform us of the funda- 

 mental and important fact Avhich ontogeny reveals to us, 

 that the most ancient common ancestors of all the different 

 animal and vegetable species were quite simple cells like 

 the egg-cell. No petrifaction could prove to us the im- 

 mensely important fact, established by ontogeny, that the 

 simple increase, the formation of cell-aggxegates and the 

 differentiation of those cells, produced the infinitely mani- 

 fold forms of multicellular organisms. Thus ontogeny helps 

 us over many and large gaps in palaeontology. 



To the invaluable records of creation furnished by 

 palaeontology and ontogeny are added the no less important 

 evidences for the blood relationship of organisms furnished 

 by comparative anatomy. When organisms, externally 

 very different, nearly agree in. their internal structure, one 

 may with certainty conclude that the agreement has its 

 foundation in Inheritance, the dissimilarity its foundation 

 in Adaptation. Compare, for example, the hands and fore 

 paws of the nine different animals which are represented 

 on Plate IV., in which the bony skeleton in the interior of-the 

 hand and of the five fingers is visible. Everywhere we find, 

 though the external forms are most different, the same bones, 

 and among them the same number, position, and connection. 

 It will perhaps appear very natural that the hand of m.an 

 (Fig. 1) differs very little from that of the gorilla (Fig. 2) and 

 of the orang-outang (Fig. 3), his nearest relations. But it will 



