We see, then, the process of an "organic creation by law," or by virtue of the inherent qualities of inorganic matter. The ordinary chemical affinities of different substances may draw them together into such compounds as albumen and fibrin, which are the proximate principles of organic tissues. The action of electricity, heat, light, or some other mysterious imponderable agent, on these proximate principles, may produce globules, or germinal vesicles. These germs, multiplying themselves by fissiparous generation, will constitute a stock of animals of a low type, such as a tribe of infusory animalcules. Then "this simplest and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like production is subordinate, gives birth to the type next above it, this again produces the next higher, and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance being in all cases very small,--namely, from one species only to another; so that the phenomenon has always been of a simple and modest character." Thus, the first reptile was born from a fish, the first bird was generated by a reptile, and the first mammifer had birds for its parents. The transformations appear rather astounding, as we pass from one class to another; but the difference between the species, even, is often so great, that the transition appears hardly less difficult. In what quadruped, for instance, do we find the first ancestor of the huge and sagacious elephant? What humble lizard gave birth to those monsters of the fossil world, the plesiosaurus and megalosaurus, thirty or forty feet in length? Man, of course, upon this theory, is only a more perfectly developed monkey, or chimpanzee. With a nod of approbation to Lord Monboddo's theory, our author observes, that man has even the rudiments of "a caudal extremity" in the _os coccygis_.