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Yet poor Chambers is reproached for "baseless speculation" because, looking upon facts accepted by all the competent embryologists of his time, he saw in them the meaning that Darwin afterwards saw, and that so great a mind as LyelPs had been unable to see. In the third edition of the "Vestiges," 1845, he wrote:

And in this Chambers found one of his chief evidences of transformation of species. Elsewhere in this edition he devotes several pages to the elaboration of the argument from recapitulation in the case of the brain. "Taking as a basis the scale of animated nature as presented in Dr. Fletcher's 'Rudiments of Physiology,'" he points out "the wonderful parity observed in the progress of creation, as presented to our observation in the succession of fossils, and also in the fœtal progress of one of the principal human organs."

8. The Argument from Rudimentary Organs.—In his "Lectures on the Phenomena of Organic Nature," 1863, Huxley mentions as illustrations of this type of evidence the fœtal teeth of the whalebone whale, the rudimentary toes in the horse's leg, the rudimentary teeth in the upper jaw of the calf. He concludes:

But from the same facts Chambers had argued to the same conclusion nearly a score of years earlier.