rst instant when its evolution can be seen at all, is seen to
develop only according to its own proper method. There is no more
confusion of germs, or embryos, than of plants or animals.

4. No instance has ever been known of a germ producing an animal, or
plant, of another species, by any process of stopping short of ripening,
or undue prolongation of it. Every seed breeds true to its kind, or not
at all, or produces a deformity. Embryology utterly refuses the notion
of the transmutation of species.

Mr. Darwin's various references to rudimentary organs, like the bones of
a hand in the flipper of the whale, or the teats of male animals, and
the like, can hardly be called arguments. He tries to account for them
and fails; acknowledging ignorance of the laws of heredity. Some of them
he will have to be young organs in process of evolution, others organs
aborted for want of exercise. In this category he ought to place the
tail which he ought to have inherited from his ancestors, as he is
greatly exercised to know what became of it. But it is evident that his
attempts to build arguments on such things, and to account for
occasional variations by atarism, are in contradiction to his
principles. Most of the known instances of the origination of permanent
varieties were not the result of infinitesimal improvements, but were
sudden and complete at once. The Japan peacocks, the short-legged
sheep, the porcupine man and his family, and the six-fingered men, were
not at all the results of a slow process of evolution; on the contrary,
they were born so, complete at once, in utter contradiction of the
theory.

5. The only other line of argument, which has any show of probability,
is that based upon _the gradations of the various orders of plants and
animals_. Not but that there are many other arguments adduced, but they
are of too technical a character to be intelligible to any but
zoologists, and of too little weight to demand consideration after the
leading arguments are overturned. But this argument from gradation,
though logically unsound, is plausibly specious, and therefore demands
notice.

By far the ablest exhibition of this argument is that made by Lamarck,
and we give it as he presents it: "The greater the abundance of natural
objects assembled together, the more do we discover proofs that
everything passes by insensible shades into something else; that even
the more remarkable differences are evanescent, and that nat