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 embiyology, 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 speciahzed." 
(Owen.) Thus the embryo ruminants Anoplotlieriurn 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 fort3''-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 Secondary mammalia belong to the 
lower sub-classes Lyea- and Lissen-cephalu, 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 tlie old deposits of the earth of an organic pro- 
gression among the snccessive 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 empii'ical 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 (c. the tape- worm), seem to " impress 
upon the minds of the most exact reasoners in biology a conviction of a constantly 
opei'ating secondary creational law." (Palreontology, p. 407.) 
I have the greatest doubt myself whether " natural selection" is this 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 o«act ii 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 vine of 
forms. They did not recollect that eveiy departure had been produced by some physical law 
— by some force operating upon that particulai- 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 natm-alist, who was still a friend of Air. 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." 
Whil^ 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. Dai'win 
ofiers a solution of the curious fact of the presence of wingless birds, e. 9., the 
Apfcnjcc of New Zeal^id, the Dodo of Mauritius, the Nesiotis of Tristo da 
Cunha, in islands rei^te from the great continents. Natural Selection here 
may modify a bird'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 Cetiosauriau. 
