56 Mr. W. S. MacLeay on the Dying Struggle 



other begins ?" Now Lamarck never made the first assertion 

 as above stated, nor have I ever made the second ; and yet 

 both of us acknowledge the law of continuity in natural hi- 

 story. 



In the Hone Entomologies I state that " Lamarck had un- 

 fortunately from a ready perception of affinities been induced 

 to confound natural order, by which is meant the actual regu- 

 larity of disposition which exists in nature, with that order of 

 formation, by which is meant the process of it in time," and 

 had thus fallen on that system of progressive development which 

 Dr. Fleming now thinks he has so wittily caricatured. Indeed 

 every naturalist who has had any perception of affinities be- 

 stowed on him by nature as among created beings, observed a 

 regularity of disposition and a gradual transition from one 

 kind to the other, which, although not such as the Doctor 

 above describes it, is nevertheless certain. No one indeed 

 can doubt the fact. Let Dr. Fleming visit any great museum 

 in Paris or London, let him for once in his life take the scalpel 

 in hand, let him study such books as the Philosophie Ana- 

 tomique, and he will soon be sensible how ignorant he has 

 been of natural history ; that is, if there be not some natural 

 imperfection that prevents him from detecting affinities. 



True it is, that chasms occur; but now, thanks to our col- 

 lectors, those chasms are comparatively trifling, and moreover 

 are every day filling up. As to their being many, it may ap- 

 pear paradoxical to the Doctor, but I wish to see infinitely 

 more of them. If indeed those that exist should never be 

 filled up by the exertions of collectors, we may still safely at- 

 tribute them either to that extinction of species which has 

 manifestly been produced by the ancient revolutions to which 

 the surface of this globe has been at various times exposed, 

 or to that extinction which has been produced by the hand of 

 man. Geology, however, according to our author, is opposed 

 to such bold ideas. Why ? " Because the strata present to the 

 student the relics of various groups of organized beings," — 

 a most convincing argument truly ; and, secondly, " Because 

 the fossils of the chalk rocks must not be mingled with those 

 of the carboniferous limestone, nor with the species which 

 now exist. All these must be studied as separate systems" ! 

 That is, the shell of a chalk rock is not a shell if it occurs in 

 carboniferous limestone, and still something else if it occurs 

 in Flisk. 



" Greatly to our annoyance," says the Doctor, " nature 

 occasionally makes a halt — as when she refused retractile 

 claws to the hunting-tiger "! So that he does not merely lay 

 down " first principles of arrangement founded on abstract 



reason- 



