and future Prospects. 5499 



alterable in Nature, whilst nothing is more variable, more corruptible, 

 than the substance." In this expression we find the result, the resume, 

 of nearly all that zoological science has done; it states simply a fact, 

 and read with the light which the ' Ossemens Fossiles' has since thrown 

 on it, tends still more to exalt the reputation of that man whose name, 

 during the Cuvierian era, had all but ceased to live. 



The grand generalization of Buffon was simply a lucid statement of 

 a fact, but a fact of the highest signification ; nothing is constant, he 

 said, but the mould, the form, that is, the species throughout all its 

 organs ; alter it as you will, the forms or moulds in which Nature has 

 cast her beings remain as they were — for ever ; she alters and modi- 

 fies them herself: the time was when there were other forms, other 

 species, other moulds, and the time will arrive when a new order of 

 things must take the place of the present; but how all this is effected 

 we know not — all that we know is that man cannot do it: we may 

 compress and torture the human brain by artificial means,* crush into 

 a hideous mass the beauteous forms of the human foot for thousands 

 of years,f still he cannot make his odious and detestable mutilations 

 and deformations, hereditary. Hippocrates thought that man could 

 thus alter Nature, but a larger experience tells us that he cannot do 

 so permanently. Modern physiologists, much occupied with little de- 

 tails, offer you certain experiments on bones and on the production of 

 hybrids, in proof that new forms may be created by man, but these 

 very experiments prove the contrary. The hybrid cannot maintain its 

 position on earth, and this is a proof, not that pre-existing germs do 

 not exist, but that the principle of life, derived from the male, modi- 

 fies that germ or mould for a time, bringing out certain specific 

 qualities appertaining to one or other parent, and distinct and ob- 

 servable, and remarkable in the case where the parents belong to dif- 

 ferent species, the young of each species containing within it the 

 possible of all its natural family. Thus, in hybridization, at least two 

 principles are at work in each parent, the specific and the generic ; 

 forms are affected thereby ; but all such deformities of Nature's moulds 

 are notoriously fleeting and have ever been excluded from Nature's 

 great plan. Naturalists also have experimented on living bones,J to 

 know how they grow, whether by a kind of intussusception of the 

 molecules or by the superimposition of layers, both in length and 

 thickness: admitting to the full the correctness of their experiments, 

 some of which, and those the most important, could be refuted by 

 facts drawn from the practice of surgery, no other inference can be 

 assumed from them than this, — that the regulating principle of the 

 growth of the bone lies not in the bone itself, but in the surrounding 

 soft tissues. That is all. The experiment enables us merely to 

 localize the regulating principle of the growth or restoration, but 

 throws no light on the nature of that principle itself. 



The question we now discuss has in Britain occasionally assumed 

 another form, perhaps for this reason, that sound zoological science 



* Chenook Indians. t Chinese race. 



