Iect. VIIL] A LONG-FINGEEED ANIMAL. 189 



Bats, and far apart from each, other, that suggest to us 

 how these long-fingered, leathern-winged folk came into 

 being, namely, the Galeopithecus, already spoken of, and 

 the Aye-Aye, a strange kind of Lemur. Yet, admitting 

 so much, we have to feign to ourselves — to imagine 

 hypothetically — an almost infinite number of forms 

 between these two strange creatures and the Bats, that 

 appeared for a time, and then vanished away. Now 

 this free use of the scientific imagination seems to 

 people, generally, to be very much unlike what calm and 

 sober science should be ; this is because the minds of 

 many are not in training as to matters of time ; they 

 do not use themselves to meditate upon long secular 

 periods. Yet a moment's refiection would show that 

 it is simply impossible, in the nature of the case, that 

 there should be an orderly sequence of phenomena, and 

 no time in which this should take place. This difii- 

 culty soon lessens in every well-ordered mind, as soon 

 as the most elementary knowledge of geology is obtained, 

 especially if the echoes of John Milton's song of the 

 creation have been allowed to die out of the inward 

 ear. 



The space, right and left, between the Lemurine 

 Aye-Aye, on the one hand, and the unclassifiable 

 Flying Cat, on the other, from the well-ordered and 

 sharply-defined group of existing Bats, is immense. 

 But no one can look at the way in which nature has 

 begun to pull out the Aye-Aye's fingers into bony wires. 



