THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 547 



He mentions also the existence of rudimentary toes in the horse, 

 the rudimentary feet of serpents, the undeveloped wings of the ostrich, 

 the teats of male mammals, the os coccygis in man. " The single fact 

 of the existence of abortive or rudimentary organs condemns " the 

 " idea of a separate creation for each organic form ; . . . for these, 

 on such a supposition could be regarded in no other light than as 

 blemishes or blunders." Such a thing was " most irreconcilable with 

 that idea of Almighty Perfection " which the special creationists were 

 at least as anxious as the author of the " Vestiges " to maintain. 

 Chambers gave the argument, here, a pious turn which did not increase 

 its logical force. But he made the main point plain enough. The 

 special creation theory could make nothing of rudimentary organs; 

 viewed in the light of the theory of development, as incidental to 

 natural descent with gradual modification, they appeared normal, in- 

 telligible and instructive. 



It is worth while, perhaps, before concluding, to bring the last six 

 arguments together, in a single general view of their logical bearings. 

 No one of them, nor all of them collectively, ever amounted to more 

 than " circumstantial evidence " of the transformation of species ; none 

 of them actually exhibits any species in flagrante delicto of transmuta- 

 tion. These arguments got their force from the fact that, when taken 

 together, they fitted with striking nicety into the requirements of one 

 of the two possible hypotheses about the origin of species — a hypothesis 

 already recommended on general grounds of scientific method; while 

 they reduced the rival hypothesis to a grotesque absurdity. " Con- 

 ceivable " that other hypothesis still remained, as Huxley contended. 

 It was, and is, possible, by making a sufficient number of supplementary 

 suppositions, to give to the special creation doctrine a form in which 

 it is neither explicitly self-contradictory nor explicitly in conflict with 

 any fact established by pure induction. But when thus fitted out with 

 the epicycles required by the facts already known to the science of 

 1840, the doctrine certainly presented a singularly odd and whimsical 

 appearance. It implied that the Creator had produced the different 

 types of organisms by fits and starts, strewing them at irregular inter- 

 vals along the vast reaches of geologic time. Precisely what happened 

 on one of these interesting occasions, the hypothesis left in a baffling 

 obscurity; after a somewhat extensive reading in the literature of the 

 period, I can not recall that any special creationist replied to Spencer's 

 request for particulars on this point. Spencer wrote in 1852 : 



Let them tell us how a new species is constructed and how it makes its 

 appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion 

 that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together 



44 " Vestiges," American (= third) edition, 1845, pp. 145-149. Chambers 

 unluckily adds: "The land animals, we may be sure, have the rudiments of 

 baleen in their organization." 



