144 
SYSTEM OF NATURE. 
“ Your reputation is so high in the opinion of the learned and curious of 
this age, that what you assert is taken and allowed to he a real fact: for 
when I have been reasoning on the improbability of swallows living under 
water, it has been replied,—‘ Dr. Linnaeus says so, and will you dispute 
his veracity ? ’ ” * Now there are few of us at the present day but think 
Peter right and the Doctor wrong: so that it is not quite conclusive when 
I am told “ Cuvier says so, and will you dispute his veracity ? ” lam 
little inclined to yield to any one in my admiration of our great master 
and teacher in Zoology, but I refuse to adopt the opinions of any man, 
merely because they were his; and therefore I wish to show that like the 
Linnean arguments for submersion as regards swallows, the saurian the¬ 
ory, as regards pterodactyles, may admit of further enquiry. 
Dr. Buckland, in his ‘ Bridgwater Treatise,’ has given a most admir¬ 
able summary of the arguments used by Cuvier on this occasion, and 
has interspersed them with most important and valuable remarks of his 
own. Dr. Buckland’s universal reputation is a sufficient guarantee for 
the excellence of this elaborate comparison of the structure of lizards and 
pterodactyles, and I generally find it quoted in preference to the 4 Osse- 
mens Fossiles,’ first, because Dr. Buckland’s knowledge of the species of 
pterodactyles is the more extensive of the two, and secondly, because his 
admirable volumes are so much more accessible than the ponderous and 
costly tomes of the French anatomist. 
It appears from both authorities that the strong and conclusive point 
— that against which there is no possibility of appeal, is the numerical 
correspondence of the joints, both in the fingers and toes. After a minute 
comparison of the joints, illustrated by some very beautiful figures, Dr. 
Buckland concludes this branch of the enquiry with these words. “ All 
these coincidences of number and proportion can only have originated in 
a premeditated adaptation of each part to its peculiar office ; they teach 
us to arrange an extinct animal under an existing family of reptiles,’’ 
&c. It is well known to zoologists that although the number of fingers 
and toes is frequently five, yet it often varies to a less number, as four, 
three and two, and even one : on numerical differences of this sort the 
greatest stress has always been laid ; the presence or absence of a finger 
or toe has always been, and always must be, considered a matter of the 
* Linn. Corr. i. 54. 
