22 ornithologist's text-book. 



atheistic system of Robinet. His doctrine bears, 

 that Nature's grand aim was to make man, and 

 being incapable of doing so at once, undertook an 

 apprenticeship (apprentisage) of experiments, by 

 making various types of his several organs ; such 

 as the hand-shaped roots of some of the orchis 

 family, the brain-stone coral, and the stink horn 

 ( Phallus foetidus, Sowerby), of many of which he 

 gives figures. ' A stone,' he says, ' an oak, a horse, 

 a monkey, a man, are only graduated variations of 

 a prototype which has begun to be realized by the 

 least possible elements. A stone, an oak, a horse, 

 are not men, but they can be regarded as types, 

 more or less conformable to the same primitive de- 

 sign, and they are all the product of the same idea, 

 more or less developed.' It was with no little as- 

 tonishment, that I found the Rev. W. Kirby, a 

 Naturalist of great talent, an accomplished scholar, 

 and a divine of the soundest religious sentiments, 

 for whose works I have a high esteem, not only 

 adopting, but eulogizing this very doctrine, as 

 coming from Mr. Macleay, though he elsewhere 

 rejects it with laudable indignation, as coming from 

 Robinet. 'According,' he says, ' to this opinion' 

 (Macleay's) which seems the most consistent of 

 any yet advanced, and which reconciles facts which 

 upon no other plan can be reconciled, the series of 

 beings is involved in the highest degree, rolling 

 wheel within wheel ad infinitum, and revolving, if 

 I may so speak, round its centre and summit — 

 man: who, though not including in himself all 

 that distinguishes them, is still the great type 

 in which they terminate, and from which they 

 degrade on all sides.' This, indeed, seems almost 

 a translation of Robinet. I am not surely called 

 upon to enter into a serious refutation of such 

 doctrines as these, or to be accused of dealing in 

 unproved assertion, by appealing for their fallacy 



