Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/73

Rh hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descendants of the ourang-ouiang, for instance, may be employed in some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to describe the remains of the quadrumana as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some huge salamander or crocodile of the Lias, might indulge, consistently with his theory, in the pleasing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of his grandfather,—a grandfather removed, of course, to a remote degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few hundred thousand great-greats."—p. 62.

A little further on we have the following dainty extract from Maillet's 'Teliamed.'

Mr. Miller justly observes that Geology abounds with those intermediate forms which naturalists have usually termed "connecting links," or, as he expresses it, links "which, as as it were, marry together dissimilar races," but which furnish no evidence that one race derived its lineage from another. We pass from one type of form to another, through successive geological formations, but we never find, as in the 'Winter's Tale,' that the grown-up sheperdess of one scene is identical with the exposed infant of the scene that went before. — Fish rank the lowest among vertebrate animals, and in geological history appear the first. It is a geological fact, that fish of the highest