146 Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. [ix. 



All this sounds very fine ; but we do not think that 

 our ignorance of this subject is so hopeless as Mr. 

 Buckle supposes. Although we are at present unable 

 to explain all the phenomena of the case, and account 

 for all the apparent exceptions that arise, we do, 

 nevertheless, all of us know that oaks always produce 

 oaks, oysters oysters, sharks sharks, dogs dogs, and 

 men men. We should probably deem it somewhat 

 out of the usual course of things, if a cow were to 

 give birth to a leopard. We are not accustomed to 

 think of a greyhound as having had for his sire an 

 Arabian steed. We do not expect, on planting a 

 nursery of acorns, to come back and find an orchard 

 of apple-trees. And even the most unexcitable, of 

 us would open his eyes at the sight of a barn-door 

 hen strutting about as the mother of a brood of 

 eaglets. And yet, if there is no such thing as the 

 transmission of qualities from parent to offspring, we 

 see no reason ^ why these hypothetical cases should 



^ Lest it should be thought that we do injustice to Mr. Buckle, in 

 giving such a broad significance to his rejection of the law of hereditary 

 transmission, we give a definition of that law, taken from one of the 

 greatest thinkers of our time : " Understood in its entirety, the law is, 

 that each plant or animal produces others of like kind with itself; the 

 likeness of kind consisting not so much in the repetition of individual 

 traits as in the assumption of the same generic structure." — Spencer's 

 Essays, p. 263. 



