Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/387

Rh parts; that no hiatus existed among natural bodies, or, in other words, that no individual stood completely apart from surrounding groups, but that all were connected by a uniform gradation of intermediate forms and characters, is a law of natural history which every day's experience tends more strongly to confirm." We sometimes find teleological views in what are presumably put forward as evolutionary suggestions. Thus Mr. Harting, in discussing the migrations of Ceylonese butterflies, is inclined to concur with Col. Swinhoe, in considering the explanation "as a sudden exodus from the birthplace, leading to a compensating reduction of the species, after a season exceptionally favourable to its increase." This "compensating reduction," or rather the method of the same, as thus expressed, seems more logically to denote design or chance, neither of which will explain the phenomena, but may reasonably be adduced to account for the theory. Perhaps one of the most orthodox and thoroughgoing teleologists was the late Frank Buckland, to whom the poisonous fangs of deadly Snakes were "the apparatus which the omniscient Creator has given to the class of Snakes to enable them to procure their food"; though, he might have added, these divinely-constructed creatures are on that very account gladly destroyed by the orthodox and heretical alike. The real difference between the teleologist and the evolutionist appears to be this. Both search for the phenomenal facts in animal life, but, when found, the teleologist goes no further than enunciating the magical word "Design." The evolutionist, on the contrary, seeks to find how the structure or property has been, and from whence, derived. With the first it is "Fall down and worship"; with the second, "Prove all things." Agassiz considered that the only classification of the animal kingdom was to be found in the plan of creation; "the free conception of the Almighty Intellect matured in His thought before it was manifested in tangible external forms." And again: "I would as soon cease to believe in the existence of one God because men worship Him in so many different ways, or because they even worship gods of