﻿KIMMERIDGE CLAY. 



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operation of a secondary law still legitimate and germain to our truth-seeking faculties ? 

 Not necessarily relegating an honest inquirer to the bottomless pit of Atheism, if he 

 should happen to ask : — Were there no volant vertebrates of earlier date and lower grade 

 than the " Fowls of the Air" ? 



Without knowing or pretending to know the way of operation of the secondary cause, 

 the vast increase of knowledge-stores of biological phenomena makes it as impossible to 

 comprehend them intelligibly in any degree, on the assumption of primary or direct 

 creation of species, as it was impossible for Copernicus to understand and explain the vast 

 accession of astronomical facts, on the belief of the subservient relation of sun to earth, 

 of the posteriority of the creation of the luminary to the light-receiver, and of their respec- 

 tive relations of motion, as received in his day. To the objection, how, on his assumption 

 of the diurnal rotation of the earth, loose things remained on its surface, Copernicus 

 could offer no explanation. Neither has the Biologist been able, as yet, to explain how 

 the Ramphorhynchus became transmuted into the Archeopteryx. It is open, of course, 

 for any one to deny such change. What seems to me to be legitimate, in giving an account 

 of the labours that have resulted in a certain accession to the knowledge of extinct forms 

 of cold-blooded, oviparous, air-breathing Vertebrates, is the indication of the respective 

 vicinity of certain groups of such now much reduced class to the warm-blooded oviparous 

 Vertebrate air-breathers which in our times so greatly prevail in life's theatre. 



Every bone in the Bird was antecedently present in the framework of the Pterodactyle ; 

 the resemblance of that portion directly subservient to flight is closer in the naked one to 

 that in the feathered flyer than it is to the fore-limb of the terrestrial or aquatic Reptile. No 

 Dinosaur has the caudal vertebrae reduced as in Birds ; many Pterodactyles manifest that 

 significant resemblance. But some Pterodactyles had long tails and all had toothed jaws. 

 A bird of the oolitic period 1 combined a long tail of many vertebras with true avian wings, 

 and it may have had teeth in its mandibles. It is certain that a later extinct bird, 2 though 

 of an early tertiary period, far back in time beyond the present reign of birds, had tooth- 

 like processes of the alveolar borders of both upper and lower jaws. 



Fact by fact, as they slowly and successively drop in, testify in favour of the coming 

 in of species by ' nomogeny,' and speak as strongly against ' thaumatogeny ' 3 or the 

 multiplication of miracle on the alternative hypothesis of the writer of ' Little Lectures on 

 Great Things/ He and his school invoke a cataclysm to extinguish the Palaeothere, and 

 an inconceivable operation to convert dust into the Hippothere ; yet a slight disproportion 

 of the outer and inner of the three hoofed toes of each foot of these quadrupeds is their 

 main difference. My critic again invokes a cataclysm to extinguish the race of 

 Hippotherian species and again requires the miracle to create the Horse. Yet the loss 

 of the small side-hoofs that dangled behind the main mid-hoof in the Hippothere is the 



1 Archeopteryx, ' Philosophical Transactions,' 1863. 



2 Odontopteryx, ' Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,' 1S73. 

 :i ' Anatomy of Vertebrates,' 8vo, vol. iii, p. 814. 



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