Darwiniana : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Thomas Henry Huxley
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Darwiniana : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    472/496 page 458
    XI you accept Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, and see reason for believing that the whalebone whale and the whale with teeth in its mouth both sprang from a whale that had teeth, and that the teeth of the foetal whale are merely remnants—recollections, if we may so say—of the extinct whale. So in the case of the horse and the rhinoceros : suppose that both have descended by modification from some earlier form which had the normal number of toes, and the persistence of the rudimentary bones which no longer support toes in the horse becomes comprehensible. In the language that we speak in England, and in the language of the Greeks, there are identical verbal roots, or elements entering into the com- position of words. That fact remains unintellig- ible so long as we suppose English and Greek to be independently created tongues; but when it is shown that both languages are descended from one original, we give an explanation of that resemblance. In the same way the existence of identical structural roots, if I may so term them, entering into the composition of widely different animals, is striking evidence in favour of the descent of those animals from a common original. To turn to another kind of illustration :—If you regard the whole series of stratified rocks—that enormous thickness of sixty or seventy thousand feet that I have mentioned before, constituting the
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