LA W OF INHERITANCE AND TBANSMI88I0N. 11 



other words, and the organism changes. The plants and 

 animals of the mummies and monuments of Egypt are prob- 

 ably the same as those now living in that country, because 

 the climate and soil have remained the same. 



The assemblages of life that have successively peopled the 

 surface of the earth, and which are geological time-marks, 

 have probably become extinct because they could not adapt 

 themselves to more or less rapid oscillations of continents 

 and islands, to consequent changes of climate and the in- 

 coming of destructive types of life. This probably accounts 

 for the origin, culmination, and extinction of different 

 types of life. The eartli has been, and still is, in a state of 

 unstable equilibrium. Organic life has been and is even 

 now, in a degree, being constantly readjusted in harmony 

 with these changes of the earth's surface and climate. Thus 

 this adaptation of organs to their uses, of animals to their 

 environment, the laws controlling the origination of new 

 forms of life and the extinction of those which have acted 

 their part and are no longer of service in the economy of 

 nature, is part of the general course of nature, and evinces 

 the Infinite Wisdom and Intelligence pervading and contin- 

 ually operating in the universe.* 



Coupled with variahility is the law of inheritance and 

 transmission of variable parts, and the habits thus induced 

 by the variation of parts. It should be observed that the 

 portions which vary most are the peripheral parts — i.e., 

 fingers and toes, tentacles and antennae, the skin and scales 

 and hair ; it is by modifications and differences brought 

 about in those parts most used by animals that the multi- 

 tudes of specific forms have resulted. There is, as Darwin 

 states, a general tendency of organisms to vary ; the laws 

 accounting for this tendency to vary have yet to be formu- 

 lated ; though the attempts of Lamarck in this direction 

 laid the way for the discovery and application of the funda- 



* That animals and plants are self-evolved, that the world has made 

 itself, and that all is the result of so-called physical and biological laws 

 operating from within outward, is as inconceivable as the mediaeval 

 dogma that animals and plants and the earth they inhabit were made 

 in the twinkling of an eye. See the concluding chapter on Evolution. 



