528 



► THE GEOLOGIST. 



of generations. To form a just conception of the whole animal kingdom, such 

 whole should be regarded in its most simple aspect, and it is not by a perti- 

 nacious negation of all theories, and by "an ossification of the organs of intelli- 

 gence," that science will be advanced. While, on the other hand, any proofs 

 which transmutationists may adduce should alone rest upon a studious regard of 

 the phenomena of embryology, and upon a synthetic mode of treating nature. 



The fact is now more clearly understood that " the types of animals first deve- 

 loped are more like the embryonic forms of their respective groups, and the pro- 

 gression observed is from those general types to forms more highly specialized." 

 (Owen.) Thus the embryo ruminants Anoplotherium and Dichodon of the Eocene 

 period appeared before the present stags and antelopes, and, in common with 

 nearly all the Eocene mammalia, maintained their typical dentition of forty-four 

 teeth, which has since given place to the more specialized and modified dentition 

 of the forms of the present day. The lowest organized mammalia appeared first 

 on our planet. At least four-fifths of the Secondaiy mammalia belong to the 

 lower sub-classes Lyen- and Lissen-cepluda, bearing close analogy, and perhaps 

 affinity to the oviparous vertebrata. " In all the orders of ancient animals, there 

 is an ascending gradation of character from first to last." Professor Owen has 

 proved that " there are traces in the old deposits of the earth of an organic pro- 

 gression among the successive forms of life." " Man, the last created, whose 

 organization is regarded as the highest, departs most from the vertebrate arche- 

 type." We must regard it as an event depending upon some higher law than 

 that of mere empirical coincidence, that the most typical animals should be found 

 first in the scale, and the most specialized last. These remarkable coincidences, 

 coupled with the astonishing facts revealed to us by the labours of those natu- 

 ralists who have by their researches on the changes and metamorphoses of the 

 lower animals, discovered the great law of Parthenogenesis, by which successive 

 alternate generations of animals are produced by and from some animals in no 

 way resembling them, such produced animals, or their descendants, in turn 

 reverting back to the original form (e. g., the tape-worm), seem to " impress 

 upon the minds of the most exact reasoners in biology a conviction of a constantly 

 operating secondary creational law." (Palaeontology, p. 407.) 



I have the greatest doubt myself whether " natural selection" is tliis vera 

 causa — this secondary law which has produced species. At the British Associa- 

 tion last September, Prof. Babington said : — 



" Nothing could be more disastrous for science than the giving up the study of individual 

 forms. If the Darwinian theory led to the abandonment of our present idea of a species, it 

 ought to lead us to be much more esact i™ the study of individual forms." 



Dr. Lankester, at the same meeting, expressed his belief that : — ■ 



" Those who had supported Mr. Darwin had done so rather on the ground that his hypo- 

 thesis had been a method of eliciting, aranging, and classifying a certain set of facts, 'than 

 aa believing that those facts led to the necessary acceptance of the hypthesis. There had 

 never been an accepted theory of the origin of species ; Mr. Darwin's strongest opponent 

 could not pretend the contrary. Persons were getting too much to mis-estimate the v"lue of 

 forms. They did not recollect that eveiy departure had been produced by some physical law 

 —by some force operating upon that particular form ; and that it was necessary to study 

 what had been the external circumstances producing that change, whether the distinct ori- 

 gin of .species was believed in or not. A great naturalist, who was still a friend of Mr. Dar- 

 win, once said to him (Dr. Lankester), ' The mistake is, that Darwin has dealt with origin. 

 Why did he not put his facts before us, and let them rest?' He believed that that was where 

 the public were in error— in supposing that those facts explained the origin of species." 



Whilst condemning the universal application of the selective principle as an 

 active agent capable of producing the complicated fauna of geological ages, let 

 me express my admiration for those convincing passages in which Mr. Darwin 

 offers a solution of the curious fact of the presence of wingless birds, e. g., the 

 Apteryx of New Zealand, the Dodo of Mauritius, the Nesiotis of Tristo da 

 Ounha, in islands remote from the great continents. Natural Selection here 

 may modify a bii-d's wings, where no functional requirement for their develop- 

 ment exists, but it can never, in my humble opinion, produce an Ornithorhynchus 

 or a whale from any bird or Cetiosaurian. 



