Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/604

586 our human faculties do not recognize beauty in the useless and dwindling rudiments of once-developed members. We are profoundly interested in the invertebrate or molluscoid eye of the vertebrate, Hatteria punctata, referred to by Dr. Dallinger, an eye "so buried in its capsule and surrounding tissue, and so covered with the skin of the head, as to make it almost inconceivable that it can be affected by even the most intense light"; but, if we are asked to admire the beauty of the arrangement, if we are summoned to recognize a wonderful example of order in the perpetuation of so functionless a structure, we hold back. The main element in beauty is fitness, the main element in order is purpose; and we see neither fitness nor purpose here. The only conceivable purpose would be to guide the biologist to the very conclusion he has arrived at, namely, that a remote ancestor of Hatteria was a mollusk; but, although as worthy, perhaps, of a few providential arrangements in his favor as anybody else, the biologist is not prone to think that such helps as he finds on the way were designed for his special benefit. He does not very well see how a past order of things could help leaving traces of itself; and he rests in the facts as they are.

Rudimentary organs, Dr. Porter assures us, bring more difficulties than aids to the doctrine of evolution. This is an extraordinary statement, seeing that competent biologists, almost without exception, have taken a directly opposite view. Does the learned doctor mean to say that biologists in general are radically incompetent to interpret the facts with which they have to deal—that facts which they ought to regard as subversive of a theory, or at least as throwing serious difficulties in its way, they accept with one accord as confirmatory of it? There is manifestly only one remedy for this state of things, and that is that the biologists of Europe and America should go to school to the ex-President of Yale, and learn from him how to read the book of Nature. Possibly, in that case, one of his bright scholars might ask him how it was, if the facts in connection with rudimentary organs brought more difficulties than aids to the doctrine of evolution, that he had himself declared, in the very same sentence in which that statement was made, that, were the doctrine of evolution satisfactorily established on other grounds, the existence of rudimentary organs would be consistent therewith. Then, perhaps, the class might be broken up. The scholars would, perhaps, not wait to hear the master discourse on embryology, and show how the successive stages of