48 INTRODUCTION. 
stock at each descent. We have yet to learn what would be 
effected by following this course through several hundreds of 
successive descents. It would almost seem as if the dog had 
been thus created. If not, where is the original stock to be 
found ?” 
“In the east world, it is peculiarly man’s interest to bring 
hundreds or thousands of species (as they are called) into a domes- 
ticated state, to use his utmost skill in bringing about considerable 
changes in many of them, and to keep extending these changes. 
The extent to which their external circumstances can be varied, 
and the facility of rapidly producing many successive generations, 
with other peculiarities appertaining to vegetable life, afford ad- 
ditional aids to his exertions. Accordingly, we find varieties 
produced, and regularly continued by descent, having greater 
differences between themselves, than are seen between other races 
generally supposed to be distinct species.” 
“An illustration may assist in showing the liability to false 
inferences, by predicating of a long series of events from in- 
specting a small part of the series. In the middle period of life, 
many individuals change so gradually that we see little difference 
between the same person on the first and last day of the same 
year. Yet is a year one-seventieth part of a life; and in the 
seventy years an individual passes from infancy to manhood, and 
thence wanes again to feebleness. Now, two or three thousand 
years may not be the seventieth, or even the seven-hundredth part 
of the duration of a species; so that an inappreciable change, 
were it established, would be no very cogent argument against a 
great change during the full series of time and events.” (Exami- 
nation of Mr. Scott’s Attack on Mr. Combe’s Constitution of 
Man). 
This last quoted passage has reference to the alleged identity of 
embalmed mummies of Egyptian animals with those now living. 
It bears on a defect in the Darwinian hypothesis, to which 
allusion will shortly be made. In the preceding extracts a very 
decided bias is evinced in favour of the transition-of-species 
theory ; especially so, considering that the subject was only an 
