XVI 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
classification which would depend on marked differences in shape and internal construction. Were 
the figures and anatomy of every animal that has lived, and of every creature which is now living on 
the globe, placed before us, the gaps which enable one genus to be separated from another would be 
filled up, and even species would cease to be distinguished. But, in spite of the artificial nature of 
the classifications, there is this to be said of them : that they give some faint indications of the 
philosophy of creation. The differences and resemblances of animals relate to structures of the body 
which have been inherited from creatures that lived in the remote past j and we glean this when it is 
known that the young unborn of one genus resemble the old and fully-formed creatures of kinds 
belonging to other classes which preceded it in the history of the globe, and when it is shown by 
the microscope that some of the parts of the bodies of the most insignificant animals of the invertebrate 
sub-kingdom resemble those of the most gifted of animals. 
A classification thus opens out a little of the scheme of Nature, and it proves that the 
resemblances and differences of animals are not matters of chance, but that there is a law which has 
produced them. Such a law, as yet but imperfectly comprehended, is Man’s idea of the action of the 
will of the Divine Creator. 
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