XXXVlll THE QUINARY SYSTEM. 
ciples, being evidently a slioot from Plato’s wild tlieory of pre- 
existant ideas, or tlie arclietypes of all things, * and more directly 
borrowed from the atheistic system of Robinet. Plis doctrine 
bears, that Nature’s grand aim was to make man, and being inca- 
pable of doing so at once, undertook an apprenticeship [appren- 
Usage) 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 fcBtidus^ 
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 developedP-\ 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.f 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.” 11 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, Tiisc. dueest. 1.15. f Robinet, De la Nature, v. vii. 
I Intr. iii, 350, note. ' ^ “ N. Diet. d’Hist. Nat. xx, 485.” |1 Intr. iv. 369. 
