9) REMARKS ON THE FIGURES OF PLATE LI, 
that they may not be comprehended under an interpreta- 
tion springing from a knowledge of the law of unity in 
variety, as we find it existing and operating at the present 
hour. 
Fig. A, the skeleton form of a Plesiosaure, manifests 
itself as being. a structure fashioned of plus and minus 
serial figures. The general form of this skeleton is sym- 
metrically developed, and the serial structures from cranium 
to the extreme caudal nodule express the arrangement 
of serial homologues subjected to the rule of proportioning. 
The length of its cervix is owing to the number of those 
serial units which have had costal quantity subtracted from 
them. Their costal circles have been withdrawn, no por- 
tion of which structures remain except the proximal ex- 
tremities. The caudal series of the units of fig. A likewise 
manifests the graduated rule of proportioning from arche- 
type quantity. We see the thoracic series of units pro- 
ducing the coste marked c, and also that the ventral 
region of costal series “produces the costal quantities 
marked g. 
In fig. B, the Ichthyosaure skeleton, we find that the 
same law -of fashioning minus from plus quantity has 
rendered it specially various to.fig. A. The costal struc- 
. tures which are minus at the cervical units of fig. A still 
persist at this region of series in fig. B, and therefore it 
is that the units succeeding the occiput of fig. A have been 
struck in cervical fitness, whereas the like numerical units 
in fig. B still remain in thoracic character. 
The caudal regions of series in fig. B and A demonstrate 
the law of graduated proportioning, and both figures may 
be cleft symmetrically from the cranium to the extreme 
caudal bone by the common median line. This mode of 
cleavage can only happen to those forms whose archetype 
series is one of costo-vertebral quantity, and whose special 
plans are such as result from archetype series being sub- 
jected to proportional degradation or metamorphosing 
subtraction. 
We shall afterwards see that the now extinct varieties 
of figs. A and B do not stand beyond the girding circle of 
archetype unity rendered proportionally various, any more 
than do the existing skeleton species of a Swan, a Porpoise, 
and a Lion. 
We here remark that the extinct fig. A is not more dif- 
form to the extinct fig. B than the existing creation, an 
Ostrich, is to the existing form of a Whale; and moreover 
the fact is demonstrable that the extinct form fig. A is no 
less comparable to the existing form of an ostrich than this 
latter is to any one of its existing vertebrated congeners. 
Whereupon we say that as a common analogy of type 
spans all the multiform eaisting creations of the four 
higher classes of animals,* and as the direction in which 
science is at present advancing is to interpret all variety as 
it now exists to be sprung of unity by the exercise of some 
force or law, so therefore as the hope remains for gathering 
together under one law all present varieties which mani- 
fest no greater contrast to each other than they do to 
figs. A and B, the hope may be also entertained that figs. 
A and B may, one time or other, bear an interpretation 
more consonant with reason than what the Geological song, 
the Miltonic rhyme, or the epic verse of Dante can furnish. 
What! have we not all enough to struggle with while 
heaving along upon this raft of reason through the open’ 
and shoreless ocean of time and space to which hypothesis 
alone can furnish limitation, without conjuring up those 
daggers of the mind from the “Inferno” of a fevered 
imagination, and because in a state of delusion itself 
regarding the past or future of body and the natural, 
must the mind therefore people the foregone or the forth- 
coming period (which it is equally ignorant of) by any 
other fancies which, not coinciding with the existing laws 
of order, must therefore be chimerical disorder. We are 
as liable to transcend the bounds of the natural, when 
seeking for the interpretation of a fact which may not be 
within the limits of our present rules of causation, as we 
are to fall short of the natural truth which such fact 
expresses, by reason of our own incapable effort in the 
explanation of the same. A fossil bone extracted from 
the soil of England serves the Geologist either as a proof 
of “sudden and universal catastrophy,” in past time, or 
else it is called a “ jew de la nature.” + 
Our generalisations, if they be founded upon the obser- 
vations of relationary facts at present in Nature, should 
not include within their measure any mode of interpreta- 
tion regarding the past but such as will rigorously coincide 
with natural, that is to say, possible and existing operation. 
What can we reason but from what we know? Nature is 
order, and we know it. If Nature has been, in past time, 
disorder, how can we know of it? Is it because we 
dig out of the Lias and Oolitic “secondary formations,” 
fig. A or B, combining the characters of a bird and 
a dolphin, that we are therefore to idealise the past of 
Nature as being either a dreary sea-shore or universal 
swamp, and draw the frontispiece of our “books of 
sea dragons” according to the slime and ruin of this 
libellous fancy ? when in fact we are as totally ignorant 
of the relative age of strata from Post Pliocene down to 
the Silurian rocks as we are of the first or the future 
appearance of this planet’s entire framework. How stands 
Nature as she is, despite her law of metamorphosis, and 
her creation of forms no less bizarre to one another than 
figs. A and B are to each other or to-them? Is Nature 
now all ocean to suit the oary limb, or is she now all 
forest gloom to be the habitation of lions and the 
elephantine denizens only? Is she all night because the 
vampyre lives? Is she all day because the eagle soars? 
How is it that when we generalise upon past Nature we 
may know where we err? It is by idealising to an undue 
magnitude any single fact in presential Nature, and 
judging of the result which, though it may be a source 
of the sublime in idea, will still be nothing else than 
the sublimity of nonsense. For when Euphrates overflows 
its banks, the Hindoo, in his sublime panic, drowns the 
moon, and all Nature to him suffers universal catastrophe, 
because to every self the self is all; but is this Nature’s 
* “Cette vérité est incontestable ; car un coup d’ceil rapide jété sur le régne animal nous a conyaincu qu’il existe un dessein primitif qu’on 
retrouve dans toutes ces formes si diverses.’—Goethe, Huvres d’ Histoire Naturelle, Introduction, p. 42. 
+ “Ces pierres figurées sont fort communes; on les appelle Zoomorphites quand le jeu de la nature leur a imprimé la ressemblance 
imparfaite de quelques animaux.”—Voltaire, Des. Singularités de la Nature. 
