REMARKS ON THE FIGURES OF PLATE LI. 3 
order? Are the interpretations of the Paleontologist, 
the Geologist, or the Cosmogonist much more according 
to reason and the physical laws than this? And when 
these talk. of “carboniferous ages,” of the “ age of rep- 
tiles,’ of “cataclysms,” of “ nebular states,”* of “ uni- 
versal fire,’ of “universal flood,” of the “ Neptunian or 
Plutonian times,” of genesis in all, and all in genesis, 
what is it else but vagrant and bewildered fancy? Whence 
is its source but in omnipotent self, that regent whose eye, 
if a cataract should blind, pronounces all to be enveloped 
in its own robes of universal night. As it is with physical 
so it is with mental vision, for to this latter, ignorance is a 
cataract in its eyeball which causes darkness, and which 
raises the magician in all its walks, acknowledging that 
“the earth hath bubbles.as the waters hath, and these 
are of them,” figs. A and B, taken as the type of “a 
reptilian age.” 
_ And suppose it be granted that figs. A and B are ex- 
pressive of some change in animal form, is it therefore 
necessary that we must, in order to suit with this simple 
evidence, bend all the order of a starry host and the 
immutable laws of @vois to any other condition in the past 
than what we know of in the present? May it not be 
probable that when doing this we are only admitting an 
error in generalisation ? such as some Mongol savant of a 
future day will be committing when digging out of the 
Ganges Delta a-crocodile’s remains now fossilizing, he shall 
hold it up to his wonderstruck auditors and proclaim it to 
be a type of this our own “age of reptiles.” If it were 
said that, all circumstances considered, the past state of 
this planet at the period which we name, “secondary” in 
stratification, when figs. A and B, and their like, are 
supposed to have represented an animal kingdom, is as far 
from truth as what the blind mole conceives of the whole 
and general fact of the nineteenth century; we believe 
that it would be as impossible to find a mathematical 
confutation of that opinion as it would be to freeze torrid 
Sol at the equator with the gentle passages of a silken 
fan ; and we have heard it said by one who is acknow- 
ledged at present to manifest in advance of the Cuvierian 
doctrines what the adult understanding contrasts with 
foregone immaturer imagery, that with the existing sum 
of Geological evidence it would be no less absurd to 
advance a generalization in respect to the truth of any 
mundane epoch in past time than it might be to chronicle, 
'_ as the actual truth, all which the peasant fancy entertains of 
what exists on this and the other side of the drop-scene 
of the blue concave. We blind ourselves with that gene- 
ralisation which a single fact gives rise to in the mind’s 
eye; and just as it is possible to eclipse with regard to 
ourselves the sun in the heavens, by drawing between 
our eye and it a saurian’s bones, who knows but when 
those bones are held so as to intercept our view of the 
luminary of probability in regard to the past that this is 
the sole origin of the eclipsing idea of “ Reptilian ages.” 
The Siberian mammoth’s bones have successively frozen, 
burned, and flooded with a rush of southern waters, the 
natura in the imagination of Gmelin, Pallas, Buffon, 
Camper, Blumenbach, Cuvier, and just as poetically 
—_—_—__—_—— to set forth 
Great things by small, 2f Nature's concord broke, 
Among the constellations war were sprung, 
Two planets rushing with aspéct malign 
Of fiercest opposition in mid sky, 
Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound. 
Comparative osteology as studied under the present 
view will, in spite of our willingness to bind it within 
recognizable limits, still branch out into the subject of 
the Geologist, and lead us on as far as the confine of a 
theme which can lend no support eto that which most 
nearly concerns ys through these pages—we mean the law 
of form. We would isolate our studies of the law of 
skeleton formation, which must include those of fossil as 
well as those of recent character, from any speculative 
consideration as to the probable condition of a past 
natura. When regarding the skeleton figure, whether. 
fossil or recent, merely as an anatomical fact or quantity 
produced at one time or another by the operation of a 
law of development, this consideration need not concern 
itself with an inquiry into the probability of that mundane 
state in which the ens was fitted to live and act. For 
while we see that the lost species of A or B still bears 
comparison with the recent species of any vertebrate form, 
the purpose of this comparison will be to know in what 
points they agree and disagree, as also how their differ- 
ences of caste have happened under the common law 
which we believe to have presided over the creation of 
both. To this end we say that fig. A and B taken as an 
organic entity need not concern us about the where and 
when of their existence any more than if we viewed them 
to-day or to-morrow in one place or in another, for they 
will still remain of their own anatomical characters when- 
ever or wherever we find them, whether this locality be 
a case of the British Museum or an armoire of the Jardin 
des Plantes, a stratum of Blue Lias Stone or a bed of 
Oolite ; since it is probable that any one of those places 
may with as much reason be regarded the natural habita- 
tion of fig. A or B as the other. As they lie before us, 
there can be no doubt that they manifest plainly a rela- 
tionship to the general type of vertebrated animals, 
proving that the law of formation in the past was an 
emanation of the same creative foree which exists in the 
present, and that the general history of this force is an 
eternal oneness or uniformity passing through a- metamor- 
phosis for the production of special variety. 
As vertebrated creations we therefore consider A and 
B, and we say of them what we have already said respect- 
ing the mammalian skeleton axis; namely, that the one is, 
as the other, the product of a law of metamorphosis exer- 
cising itself upon the serial costo-vertebral archetypes ; for 
we see that plus quantity persists at a certain region of 
the axis of fig. A or B, and that this region is thoracic ; 
whereas minus quantity fashions certain other regions of 
their serieses, which regions still pass by the names of 
* “Quelle qui soit la nature de cette cause, puisqu’elle a produit ou dirigé les mouvements des planétes, il faut quelle ait embrassé tous 
ces corps ; et, vu la distance prodigieuse qui les sépare, elle ne peut avoir été qu’un fluide immense étendue.—Les planétes ont été formées, par 
1a condensation des zones de vapeurs.”—Laplace, Exposition du Systéme du Monde, tome ii, pp. 432, 435, 
