Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    241/408 page 233
    efforts to swim, the outstretching of its claws would lead to the expansion of the intermediate membranes, and it would thus become web-footed, Now it is possible that wants and the exercise of faculties have entered in some manner into the production of the phenomena which we have been considering ; but certainly not in the way suggested by Lamarck, whose whole notion is obviously so inadequate to account for the rise of the organic kingdoms, that we only can place it with pity among the follies of the wise. Had the laws of organic development been known in his time, his theory might have been of a more imposing kind. It is upon these that the present hypothesis is mainly founded. I take existing natural means, and shew them to have been capable of producing all the existing organisms, with the simple and easily conceivable aid of a higher generative law, which we perhaps still see operating upon a limited scale. I also go beyond the French philosopher to a very important point, the original Divine con- ception of all the forms of being which these natural laws were only instruments in working out and realizing. ‘The actuality of such a conception receives a remarkable support from the glimpses which we obtain, through the medium of the dis-
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image