84. MAMMALIAN DESCENT. [Lbct. III. 



Of course, only the biological reader of such communications can 

 value them properly, as he only can thoroughly understand their 

 meaning and their bearings ; and yet the patient and thoughtful 

 general reader may come at the gist of the matter. But first of all 

 he must bind up all his old misconceptions into a bundle and burn 

 them, and come into the Temple of Nature with child-like simplicity 

 of mind, and not like that "praying, synagogue-frequenting beau," 

 who walked up to the Holy Place straight as a ram-rod — stiff with 

 pride and prejudice. 



We know that in the oldest oak-tree living there has been no 

 discontinuity of vital action since it first germinated, and that its 

 germ, with the closely-packed cotyledons, were not created, but grew. 



These first, or larval, leaves, the cotyledons, had their day, and did 

 their day's work like honest labourers, so also did the first crop of 

 normal leaves, and the second crop, and so on, year after year, all 

 doing the work of their generation. This increasing family of leaves 

 budded and grew, and stopped in their growth and died j but they all 

 helped to make that forest-king. 



As long as we think of the oak, merely, we can run back for some 

 length of supposed time, along the Hue of our imagined oak-tree's an- 

 cestors. But if we were to go some distance back — very far back, no 

 doubt — we should find ourselves lost, for our oak would be the English 

 kind no longer ; we should have reached the point where all the species 

 of oak would meet in one generalised type. But the oak family has 

 its relatives, and these would, far enough back, all become undis- 

 tinguishable. Along such a descending road we should never find rest 

 until we had reached the common, most generalised, protoplasmic- 

 niother-stufi', whose descendants, on our return journey, would turn 

 cut to be every green thing, every plant or herb or tree that the 

 earth has borne, or is stiU bearing. This thrice-ancient mother of 

 all the plants is the same as she who was the fruitful mother of all 

 sentient creatures or animals. From her sprang the fishes of the 

 sea, the fowls of heaven, and the beasts of the earth. If we could 

 follow the pedigree of every living, moving creature, it would be 

 traceable back to that common protoplasmic mass. " Wisdom " saw 

 the green com, the rose, and the oak ; and also birds, and cattle, and 

 men, in their first beginnings. Solomon says — and he, the wisest of 

 the sons of men, should know — that She rejoiced in, and that her 



