Let us now follow this mode of disposing of the hypothesis of special creations, by adverting to some of the facts that are adduced in its summary condemnation; and, although the passage which I am about to quote is found in Mr. Spencer's work under the head of morphology, the illustration applies equally well to his argument from classification. Speaking of fundamental likenesses of structure, he says: "Under the immensely varied forms of insects, greatly elongated like the dragon-fly, or contracted in shape like the lady-bird, winged like the butterfly, or wingless like the flea, we find this character in common--there are primarily twenty segments. These segments may be distinctly marked, or they may be so fused as to make it difficult to find the divisions between them. This is not all. It has been shown that the same number of segments is possessed by all the _Crustacea_. The highly consolidated crab, and the squilla with its long, loosely-jointed divisions, are composed of the same number of somites. Though, in the higher crustaceans, some of these successive indurated rings, forming the exo-skeleton, are never more than partially marked off from each other, yet they are identifiable as homologous with segments, which, in other crustaceans, are definitely divided. What, now, can be the meaning of this community of structure among these hundreds of thousands of species filling the air, burrowing in the earth, swimming in the water, creeping about among the sea-weed, and having such enormous differences of size, outline, and substance, as that no community would be suspected between them? Why, under the down-covered body of the moth and under the hard wing-cases of the beetle, should there be discovered the same number of divisions as in the calcareous framework of the lobster? It can not be by _chance_ that there exist just twenty segments in all these hundreds of thousands of species. There is no reason to think it was _necessary_, in the sense that no other number would have made a possible organism. And to say that it is the result of _design_--to say that the Creator followed this pattern throughout, merely for the purpose of maintaining the pattern--is to assign a motive which, if avowed by a human being, we should call whimsical. No rational interpretation of this, and hosts of like morphological truths, can be given except by the hypothesis of evolution; and from the hypothesis of evolution they are corollaries. If organic forms have arisen from common stocks by perpetual divergences and redivergences--if they have continued to inherit, more or less clearly, the characters of ancestral races, then there will naturally result these communities of fundamental structure among extensive assemblages of creatures, that have severally become modified in countless ways and degrees, in adaptation to their respective modes of life. To this let it be added that, while the belief in an