_ Prof. Owen on Life and Species. 43 
also shows that a species might originate independently of the 
operation of any external influence ; that change of structure 
would precede that of use and habit ; that appetency, impulse, 
ambient medium, fortuitous fitness of surrounding circum- 
stances, or a personified ‘selecting Nature,’ would have had 
no share in the transmutative act. 
close of that other series of researches proving the ‘ skeleton of 
: all Vertebrates, and even of Man, to be the harmonized sum 
2 of a series of essentially similar segments,’* I have been led to 
recognize species as exemplifying the continuous operation of 
| natural law, or secondary cause ; and that, not only successively, 
ut progressively ; from the first embodiment of the Verte- 
brate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment until it became ar- 
i 
: rayed in the glorious garb of the Human form.’ 
’ * oxu, p. 119. : 
| é4 Tb, ». 86. Even in his partial quotation from my work of 1849, the author of 
_-- Coxm’’ (4th Ed. 1866) might have se d for apologizing for his preposterous 
: sertion, in 1859:—-that ‘ Professor O intained, often vehemently, the im- 
‘ mutability of species’ (p. 310), and for the question, as preposterous and un- 
Y: ‘Does he really believe that at innumerable periods in tl 8 history 
oe 1859, wren ihe Ie. of 1860, p. 111, the fsutaliat tw tnt sade, 
4 : , p- 483. In the Pp 1€ imputation Is * Aol ea tema 
The signi 4 nee of the concluding paragraphs of cxtt was plain enough to BADEN 
‘OWELL, ccoxxxmt’’, p. 401 (1855), and drew down on me the hard epi with — 
_ Which Theology usually assails the inbringer of unwelcome light, + p- 61. 
