434 
MOKPHOLOGY. 
Chap. XIII. 
the general name of Morphology. This is the most 
interesting department of natural history, and may 
be said to be its very soul. What can be more curious 
than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, 
that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the 
paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should 
all be constructed on the same pattern, and should 
include similar bones, in the same relative positions? 
Geoffroy St. Hilaire has insisted strongly on the high 
importance of relative connexion in homologous organs: 
the parts may change to almost any extent in form and 
size, and yet they always remain connected together 
in the same order. We never find, for instance, the 
bones of the arm and forearm, or of the thigh and leg, 
transposed. Hence the same names can be given to 
the homologous bones in widely different animals. * We 
see the same great law in the construction of the mouths 
of insects: what can be more different than the im¬ 
mensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the 
curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws 
of a beetle ?—yet all these organs, serving for such dif¬ 
ferent purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modi¬ 
fications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of 
maxillae. Analogous laws govern the construction of 
the mouths and limbs of crustaceans. So it is with the 
flowers of plants. 
Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to 
explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same 
class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. The 
hopelessness of the attempt has been expressly admitted 
by Owen in his most interesting work on the ‘ Nature of 
Limbs.’ On the ordinary view of the independent creation 
of each being, we can only say that so it is that it has 
so pleased the Creator to construct each animal and plant. 
The explanation is manifest on the theory of the 
