ant improvement of them for the purposes required.

The third great want amongst animals is that of security, which seems much
to have diversified the forms of their bodies and the colour of them; these
consist in the means of escaping other animals more powerful than
themselves. Hence some animals have acquired wings instead of legs, as the
smaller birds, for the purpose of escape. Others great length of fin, or of
membrane, as the flying fish, and the bat. Others great swiftness of foot,
as the hare. Others have acquired hard or armed shells, as the tortoise and
the echinus marinus.

Mr. Osbeck, a pupil of Linnaeus, mentions the American frog fish, Lophius
Histrio, which inhabits the large floating islands of sea-weed about the
Cape of Good Hope, and has fulcra resembling leaves, that the fishes of
prey may mistake it for the sea-weed, which it inhabits. Voyage to China,
p. 113.

The contrivances for the purposes of security extend even to vegetables, as
is seen in the wonderful and various means of their concealing or defending
their honey from insects, and their seeds from birds. On the other hand
swiftness of wing has been acquired by hawks and swallows to pursue their
prey; and a proboscis of admirable structure has been acquired by the bee,
the moth, and the humming bird, for the purpose of plundering the nectaries
of flowers. All which seem to have been formed by the original living
filament, excited into action by the necessities of the creatures, which
possess them, and on which their existence depends.

From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the
warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they
undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how
minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described
have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great
length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages
before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to
imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living
filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power
of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by
irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing
the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of
delivering down those improvements by generation to its poste