234 



EXPLANATIONS 



ascending grades of the animal kingdom. With respect, 

 then, to what follows— " The sentence on which we here 

 comment contains three distinct propositions, and all 

 three are false to nature, and no. better than a dream,"- 

 I believe I may safely leave the reader to say which party 

 is the falsifier and the dreamer. He goes on in the sam<? 

 strain — " It is true that the next step gives us fishes; but 

 it is not true that the earliest fishes link on to the radiata: 

 this is o grand and, at the present day, an unpardonable 

 blunder." This is another dream of the reviewer, for 

 certainly such an affinity was not suggested in any edition 

 of the Vestiges hitherto published. In the first four edi- 

 tions, which alone were under his notice, no passage ex- 

 cept from the articulata was even hinted at. So much 

 as a proof of the reviewer's recklessness in making 

 charges; there is no need, however, to affirm, with him, 

 that a connection between certain high radiates and some 

 of the lowest fishes does not exist. I venture to predict 

 that affinities of an equally startling nature w»U yet be 

 made familiar to naturalists. Meanwhile, it is enough to 

 show that this confident critic has raised an accusation for 

 which he has not a shadow of ground. 



Taking up the special fossils of the Permian system, 

 he says, " The earliest reptiles are not of such a structure 

 as to link themselves, on a natural scale, to the noble 

 sauroids of the preceding carboniferous epoch." They 

 are not the marine saurians, or fish lizards (ichthyosauri) 

 which occur in a higher formation, but lacertilians, 01 

 animals of lizard-like character. Now what firststrik.es 

 me here is the extraordinary narrowness of a mind which 

 sees nothing indicative of natural procedure, no hint 

 towards great generalizations, in the simple fact of rep- 

 tiles following upon fish in this grand march of life 

 through the morning time of the world. He knows that, 

 in every classification of the animal kingdom, reptiles 

 rank next above fish, that in some living families there is 

 such a convention and intermixture of both characters, 

 that naturalists cannot agree to which class the) r should 

 be assigned. He actually sees, in a general view of the 

 earlier reptiliferous formations, animals combining the 

 fish and reptile in the most unequivocal manner. De- 

 spising, however, the great fact which shines through 

 these obscurities this person, and I am sorry to add, geol- 

 ogists generally, can only asten upon such particulars as 



