Fishes. 45 



hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thou- 

 sand years hence. The descendants of the ourang-outang, for instance, may be em- 

 ployed in some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to 

 describe the remains of the quadrumana as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck 

 himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some huge salaman- 

 der or crocodile of the Lias, might indulge, consistently with his theory, in the pleas- 

 ing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of his grandfather, — a grandfather 

 removed, of course, to a remote degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few 

 hundred thousand great-greats y — p. 62. 



A little further on we have the following dainty extract from Mail- 

 let's ' Teliamed.' 



" Winged or flying fish, stimulated by the desire of prey, or the fear of death, or 

 pushed near the shore by the billows, have fallen among reeds or herbage, whence it 

 was not possible for them to resume their flight to the sea, by means of which they had 

 contracted their first facility of flying. Then their fins, being no longer bathed in the 

 sea-water, were split and became warped by their dryness. While they found, among 

 the reeds and herbage among which they fell, any aliments to support them, the ves- 

 sels of their fins being separated, were lengthened and clothed with beards, or, to speak 

 more justly, the membranes which before kept them adherent to each other, were me- 

 tamorphosed. The beard formed of these warped membranes was lengthened. The 

 skin of these animals was insensibly covered with a down of the same colour with the 

 skin, and this down gradually increased. The little wings they had under their belly, 

 and which, like their wings, helped them to walk in the sea, became feet, and served 

 them to walk on land. There were also other small changes in their figure. The 

 beak and neck of some were lengthened, and those of others shortened. The confor- 

 mity, however, of the first figure subsists in the whole, and it will be always easy to 

 know it. Examine all the species of fowls, large and small, even those of the Indies, 

 those which are tufted or not, those whose feathers are reversed, such as we see at Da- 

 mietta, that is to so say, whose plumage runs from the tail to the head, and you will 

 find species quite similar, scaly or without scales. All species of parrots, whose plu- 

 mages are so diff'erent, the rarest and the most singular-marked birds, are, conformable 

 to fact, painted like them with black, brown, grey, yellow, green, red, violet-colour, 

 and those of gold and azure ; and all this precisely in the same parts where the plu- 

 mages of those birds are diversified in so curious a manner." (Teliamed, p. 224, Ed. 

 1750.— p. 65. 



Mr. Miller justly observes that Geology abounds with those inter- 

 mediate forms which naturalists have usually termed " connecting 

 links," or, as he expresses it, links " which, as as it were, marry toge- 

 ther dissimilar races," but which furnish no evidence that one race 

 derived its lineage from another. We pass from one type of form to 

 another, through successive geological formations, but we never find, 

 as in the ' Winter's Tale,' that the grown-up sheperdess of one scene 

 is identical with the exposed infant of the scene that went before. — 

 Fish rank the lowest among vertebrate animals, and in geological his- 

 tory appear the first. It is a geological fact, that fish of the highest 



