a new Fossil Animal . 
561 
The family, then, to which we would thus refer the animals 
above mentioned, and to which future researches may be expected 
to add other analogous genera,* may be described as including 
animals approaching more closely to the Saurian or Lizard family, 
and especially to the genus Crocodile, than to any other recent type; 
yet receding from it in many important characters, especially in the 
form of their paddles, which possess an intermediate structure 
between the feet of quadrupeds and the finsf of fishes, and have 
been well distinguished by the above appropriate name. As these 
capable of supporting animal life should be so filled, and that every possible mode of 
sustenance should be taken advantage of ; hence every possible variety of structure 
became necessary, many of them such as to involve a total change of parts, but others 
again, such as required nothing beyond a modification of similar parts, slight indeed in 
external appearance, yet important in subserving the peculiar habits and economy of the 
different animals ; in these cases the unity of general design was preserved, while the 
requisite peculiarity of organisation was superinduced ; nor can there be any where found 
a more striking proof of the infinite riches of creative design, or of the infinite wisdom 
which guided their application. Some physiologists however (and Lamarck is more 
especially censurable on this account) have most ridiculously imagined that the links 
hence arising represent real transitions from one branch to another of the animal kingdom ; 
that through a series of such links, and by means of the constant tendency of the vital 
fluids, urged by animal appetencies to perfect old organs and develop new ones, that 
which was once a polypus became successively a mollusca, a fish, a quadruped ; an idea so 
monstrous, and so completely at variance with the structure of the peculiar organs con- 
sidered in the detail (which is in the great majority of instances such that no conceivable 
appetency could have any conceivable tendency to produce it) and no less so with 
the evident permanency of all animal forms, that nothing less than the credulity of a 
material philosophy could have been brought for a single moment to entertain it — nothing 
less than its bigotry to defend it. 
* I do not intend here to include those fossil animals, which are clearly only distin- 
guished by specific characters from the recent crocodiles, but those which, though 
approximating more closely to this than to any other type, are yet marked by generic and 
essential differences. 
+ The analogy of these paddles to the fins of fish consists in the number, not in the 
form of the joints composing them. In many respects, as will hereafter be shewn, they 
approach most nearly to the paddles of the turtle. 
4 b 2 
