CHAPTER III.

Lamarck's Theory of Progression illustrated.-Class of Facts which give Colour to it.-The Credulity of Unbelief.-M. Maillet and his Fish-birds. - Gradation not Progress. Geological Argument. - The Present incomplete without the Past.-Intermediate Links of Creation.-Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.-The Pterichthys.-Its first Discovery.-Mr Murchison's Decision regarding it.-Confirmed by that of Agassiz.-Description.-The several Varieties of the Fossil yet discovered.-Evidence of Violent Death, in the Attitudes in which they are found.-The Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red.-Description.-Gradations from Crustacea to Fishes.-Habits of the Coccosteus.— Scarcely any Conception too Extravagant for Nature to realize.

MR LYELL'S brilliant and popular work, The Principles of Geology, must have introduced to the knowledge of most of my readers the strange theories of Lamarck. The ingenious foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts, which prove that, to a certain extent, the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders of being towards the superior; and that the offspring of creatures low in the scale in the present time, may hold a much higher place in it, and

belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descendants of the ourang-outang, for instance, may be employed in some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to describe the remains of the quadrumana as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some huge salamander or crocodile of the Lias, might indulge, consistently with his theory, in the pleasing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of his grandfather, a grandfather removed, of course, to a remote degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few hundred thousand great-greats. Never yet was there a fancy so wild and extravagant but there have been men bold enough to dignify it with the name of philosophy, and ingenious enough to find reasons for the propriety of the name.

The setting-dog is taught to set; he squats down and points at the game; but the habit is an acquired one,a mere trick of education. What, however, is merely acquired habit in the progenitor, is found to pass into instinct in the descendant: the puppy of the setting-dog squats down and sets untaught; the educational trick of the parent is mysteriously transmuted into an original principle in the offspring. The adaptation which takes place in the forms and constitution of plants and animals, when placed in circumstances different from their ordinary ones, is equally striking. The woody plant of a warmer climate, when transplanted into a colder, frequently exchanges its ligneous stem for a herbaceous one, as if in anticipation of the killing frosts of winter; and,

dying to the ground at the close of autumn, shoots up again in spring. The dog, transported from a temperate into a frigid region, exchanges his covering of hair for a covering of wool: when brought back again to his former habitat, the wool is displaced by the original hair. And hence, and from similar instances, the derivation of an argument, good so far as it goes, for changes in adaptation to altered circumstances of the organization of plants and animals, and for the improvability of instinct. But it is easy driving a principle too far. The elasticity of a common bow, and the strength of an ordinary arm, are fully adequate to the transmission of an arrow from one point of space to another point a hundred yards removed; but he would be a philosopher worth looking at who would assert that they were equally adequate for the transmission of the same arrow from points removed, not by a hundred yards, but by a hundred miles. And such, but still more glaring, has been the error of Lamarck. He has argued on this principle of improvement and adaptation, which, carry it as far as we rationally may, still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog, that in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen into superior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and zoophites have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and reptiles into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed gelatinous bodies, with an organization scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed into human creatures, capable of understanding and admiring the theories of Lamarck. Assuredly there is no lack of

faith among infidels; their " vaulting" credulity o'erleaps revelation, and "falls on the other side." One of the first geological works I ever read was a philosophical romance, entitled Teliamed, by a Mon. Maillet, an ingenious Frenchman of the days of Louis XV. This Maillet was by much too great a philosopher to credit the scriptural account of Noah's flood, and yet he could believe, like Lamarck, that the whole family of birds had existed at one time as fishes, which, on being thrown ashore by the waves, had got feathers by accident; and that men themselves are but the descendants of a tribe of sea-monsters, who, tiring of their proper element, crawled up the beach one sunny morning, and, taking a fancy to the land, forgot to return.*

*Few men could describe better than Maillet. His extravagancies are as amusing as those of a fairy tale, and quite as extreme. Take the following extract as an instance :

"Winged or flying fish, stimulated by the desire of prey, or the fear of death, or pushed near the shore by the billows, have fallen among reeds or herbage, whence it was not possible for them to resume their flight to the sea, by means of which they had contracted their first facility of flying. Then their fins, being no longer bathed in the sea-water, were split, and became warped by their dryness. While they found, among the reeds and herbage among which they fell, any aliments to support them, the vessels of their fins being separated, were lengthened and clothed with beards, or, to speak more justly, the membranes which before kept them adherent to each other, were metamorphosed. The beard formed of these warped membranes was lengthened. The skin of these animals was insensibly covered with a down of the same colour with the skin, and this down gradually increased. The little wings they had under their belly, and which, like their wings, helped them to walk in the sea, became feet, and served them to walk on land. There were also other small changes

"How easy," says this fanciful writer, "is it to conceive the change of a winged fish, flying at times through the water, at times through the air, into a bird flying always through the air!" It is a law of nature, that the chain of being, from the lowest to the highest form of life, should be, in some degree, a continuous chain; that the various classes of existence should shade into one another, so that it often proves a matter of no little difficulty to point out the exact line of demarcation where one class or family ends and another class or family begins. The naturalist passes from the vegetable to the animal tribes, scarcely aware, amid the perplexing forms of intermediate existence, at what point he quits the precincts of the one to enter on those of the other. All the animal families have, in like manner, their connecting links; and it is chiefly out of these that writers such as Lamarck and Maillet construct their system. They confound gradation with progress. Geoffrey

in their figure. The beak and neck of some were lengthened, and those of others shortened. The conformity, however, of the first figure subsists in the whole, and it will be always easy to know it. Examine all the species of fowls, large and small, even those of the Indies, those which are tufted or not, those whose feathers are reversed, such as we see at Damietta, that is to say, whose plumage runs from the tail to the head, and you will find species quite similar, scaly or without scales. All species of parrots, whose plumages are so different, the rarest and the most singular-marked birds, are, conformable to fact, painted like them with black, brown, gray, yellow, green, red, violet-colour, and those of gold and azure; and all this precisely in the same parts where the plumages of those birds are diversified in so curious a manner." (Teliamed, p. 224, ed. 1750.)