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.

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    coveries of Mr. Macleay, with regard to the affini- ties and analogies of animal (and by implication vegetable) organisms.* Such a regularity in the structure, as we may call it, of the classification of animals, as is there beginning to be revealed to us, is totally irreconcilable with the idea of form going on to form merely as needs and wishes in the animals themselves dictated. Had such been the case, all would have been irregular, as things arbi- trary necessarily are. But, lo, the whole plan of being appears to be as symmetrical as the plan of a house, or the laying out of an old-fashioned garden! ‘This must needs have been devised and arranged for beforehand. And what a preconcep- tion or forethought have we here! For let us only for a moment consider how various are the external - physical conditions in which animals live—climate, soil, temperature, land, water, air; the peculiarities of food, and the various ways in which it is to be sought; the peculiar circumstances in which the business of reproduction and the care-taking of the young are to be attended to: all these requiring to be taken into account, and thousands of animals to be formed suitable in organization and mental * These affinities and analogies are explained in the next chapter.
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