465 
makes it as hard to comprehend them intelligibly in any degree, on the assumption of 
primary or direct creation of species, as it was difficult for Copernicus to understand 
and explain the vast accession of astronomical facts in his day, on the belief of the sub- 
servient relation of sun to earth, of the posteriority of the creation of the luminary to 
that of the light-receiver, and of their respective relations of motion, as then held. To 
the objection, how, on his assumption of the diurnal rotation of the earth, loose things 
remained on its surface, Copernicus could offer no explanation. Neither has the 
biologist been able, as yet, to explain how the Ramphorhynchus became transmuted 
into the Archeopteryx. It is open, of course, to deny such change, or that the 
feathered class has been, in any way, a development of an unfeathered one. But if 
speculation on the origin of Aves by secondary law be allowable, the extinct volant 
forms of the Reptilia offer a much more likely point of departure than the extinct 
heavy quadrupedal and terrestrial forms of the cold-blooded class. And if we restrict 
our survey to a narrower field, where conditions of life and of structure are surer and 
more abundant, and so speculate on the genesis of Didus or Dinornis, guiding or reining 
the roaming fancy by facts, the geographical limitation of such ornithicnitoid species, 
and their primitive association exclusively with creatures of which they could have 
no dread, suggest the more obvious and intelligible hypothesis of derivation from 
antecedent birds of flight, whose wings they still show more or less aborted, according 
to Buffon’s principle of transmutation by degeneration——-with a progressive pre- 
dominance of the legs over the wings, ultimately resulting, agreeably with the 
Lamarckian view, in a maximization of the terrestrial and abortion of the aerial 
instruments of locomotion. 

