xxxviii 



THE QUINARY SYSTEM. 



ciples, being evidently a shoot from Plato's wild theory of pre- 

 existant ideas, or the archetypes of all things, # and more directly 

 borrowed from the atheistic system of Robinet. His doctrine 

 bears, that Nature's grand aim was to make man, and being inca- 

 pable of doing so at once, undertook an apprenticeship (appren- 

 tisage) of experiments, by making various types of his several 

 organs ; such as the hand-shaped roots of some of the orchis fa- 

 mily, the brain-stone coral, and the stink horn, (Phallus fcetidus, 

 Sowerby,) of many of which he gives figures. " A stone," he 

 says, " an oak, a horse, a monkey, a man, are only graduated va- 

 riations 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 design, and they are all the product of the same 

 idea, more or less developed '."f It was with no little astonish- 

 ment, 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 laud- 

 able 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 to the plain sense of the 

 reader. On the contrary, I am most justly entitled to call for a 

 proof of the assumptions, that a stone has improved itself into an 



* Cicero, Tusc. Uuaest. I. 15. f Robinet, De la Nature, v. vii. 



% Intr. iii. 350, note. § " N. Diet. d'Hist. Nat. xx. 485." || Intr. iv. 369. 



