50 Prof. Owen on Life and Species. 
son ; and I may assume the special primary creative hypothe- 
sis of the successive and coexisting species of Anthozoa to be 
not now held by the scientific naturalist. 
uet us then test the propounded explanations of their origin 
by secondary law. That of ‘appetency’ subsides from the 
impotency of a coral-polyp to exercise volition. The weak 
point of Lamarck’s creative machinery is its limited applica- 
bility, viz: to creatures high enough in the scale to be able to 
‘want to do something :’ for the determined laws of the ‘re- 
flex function’ in the physiology of the nervous system and the 
necessity of the superadded cerebral mass for true sensation 
rigorously fix the limits of volitional faculties, 
We pass then to considerations of the ‘ambient medium’ 
and ‘natural selection.’ We have no evidence that the fabri- 
cators of the coral-reef of Wenlock-edge, or of those skirting 
the Cambrian slates and Devonshire ‘ killas,’ or of those in the 
lofty limestone cliffs of Cheddar, worked in an ocean other- _ 
wise constituted than the present. What conceivable charac- 
ter of sea or of the air dissolved or diffused therein could have — 
changed the loose aggregation of the individuals of composite — 
Rugosa into the close combination, with intercommunicating — 
pores, of those of the composite Tabulata ? Or what possi- — 
ble external influence could have transmuted the comparatively — 
simple massive mode of growth or deposition of carbonate of 
lime common to both Rugosa and Tabulata into the light and — 
titions alone.occupy the deserted cell and extend uninterrupt- — 
ly from its bottom or beginning to the superficial inhabited 
is done by the ‘ nisus forma 
