ANIMAL KINGDOM. 253 



them? Has M. Cuvier even drawn such a conclusion 

 when he placed his Pteropoda immediately after his Ce- 

 phalopoda? It is unquestionably true that fishes have 

 little or no direct affinity with the Cephalopoda ; but it is 

 not the instancing any solitary or single case of dissimila- 

 rity, but the impossibility of finding any mode of connecting 

 them, that will prove this. I know indeed no better proof 

 of the fact, than that naturalists have been so long seeking 

 to discover some such direct affinity, and have all failed 

 in their endeavours to detect it. But single instances of 

 discrepancy ought never to be employed to establish this 

 truth, since, should we grant the accuracy of this mode of 

 reasoning, there would be an end of every thing like the 

 filiation of nature, or the gradual developement of animal 

 organization. Every difference however trifling might then 

 be brought forward to prove that Nature had committed 

 a great saltus. M. Cuvier indeed in his third proposition 

 appears too hastily to have set aside the old maxim of 

 Linnaeus, Natura, opifex rerum, saltus non Jacit. No 

 person as yet can be sure that any saltus exists in nature, 

 unless indeed the small interval which separates species 

 may deserve that name. In the case of the Cephalopoda, 

 as terminating a series, such a saltus could never be proved 

 by any particular distinction existing between them and 

 fishes, but by the impossibility of finding any general 

 affinity between them and the Vertebrata. But so far 

 from this, our author commences his statement of the sub- 

 ject with the full allowance of the existence of some such 

 affinity, which indeed it would be ridiculous in any but a 

 blind person to deny. Now convinced, as most persons 

 are, that where there is an acknowledged affinity between 

 the whole, there must necessarily be some affinity between 



