130 
SYSTEM O'F NATURE. 
we are lost in endeavouring to form any definite idea 
respecting it: yet from the instant the Creator first willed 
the organization and vivification of matter there has been 
no material change in structural condition. The fossil 
shell imbedded in the slates of Snowdon, — probably one 
of the earliest forms of organized matter,—is structurally 
almost identical with thousands of bivalves, whose inha¬ 
bitants are even now in full possession of all the pleasures 
their station in the universe permits them to enjoy. The 
fishes that fed on these mollusks had bones and muscles, 
and scales and gills, similar to those of our fishes. The 
sharks that devoured those fishes w T ere constructed like 
the sharks now so dreaded by our mariners. Even in 
those anomalous beings, the trilobites, ammonites and 
pterodactyles, the difficulties arise rather out of the resem¬ 
blance than the discrepancy. In the pterodactyle, almost 
every bone is obviously identical with those in the human 
frame ; and if a doubt still hangs over its class, — if one 
zoologist considers it a bat, a second a bird, a third — the 
greatest of all — a lizard, and if the writer of these pages 
ventures to suggest that it might have been a marsupial, 
surely the inference to be drawn from this contrariety of 
opinion is, that the skeleton of these seemingly dissimilar 
beings is formed on one plan; and, as each party claims 
the pterodactyle as appertaining to a section of this plan, 
it is a fair and obvious inference that the creature must 
belong to the plan itself. 
I cannot for a moment suppose that each creation was 
a system, and that the relics of departed ages are records 
of systems now no more. I cannot disconnect the present 
from the past. I believe in one only system, and that the 
trilobites, ammonites and pterodactyles are not simply 
