from corruption, and we can now satisfy ourselves, by our own eyes, what was the condition of many species three thousand years ago. It is difficult to restrain the transports of our imagination, when we behold thus preserved, with their minutest bones, the smallest portions of their skin, and in every respect most perfectly recognizable, many animals, which at Thebes or Memphis, two or three thousand years ago, had their own priests and altars.” In regard to these curious relicts, Lamarck was forced to admit that they were identical with their living descendants in the same country, and accounted for it by saying that this happened because the climate and other physical conditions of the latter had long continued unaltered. But he makes no attempt to account for the fact which is so fatal to his theory, that these remains entirely correspond to individuals of the same species in many different quarters of the globe, where the physical conditions are so dissimilar that they ought to have produced important changes[8]. It will likewise be observed as an important defect in Lamarck’s argument, that he can cite no positive fact to exemplify the substitution of some _entirely new_ sense, faculty, or organ, in the room of some other suppressed as useless. “All the instances adduced,” says Mr. Lyell, “go only to prove that the dimensions and strength of members, and the perfection of certain attributes may, in a long succession of generations, be lessened and enfeebled by disuse; or, on the contrary, be matured and augmented by active exertion, just as we know that the power of scent is feeble in the greyhound, while its swiftness of pace and its acuteness of sight are remarkable; that the harrier and staghound, on the contrary, are comparatively slow in their movements, but excel in their sense of smelling. We point out to the reader this important chasm in the chain of the evidence, because he might otherwise imagine that we had merely omitted the illustrations for the sake of brevity; but the plain truth is, that there were no examples to be found, and when Lamarck talks of ‘the efforts of internal sentiment,’ ‘the influence of subtile fluids,’ and the ‘acts of organization,’ as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire _new organs_, he gives us names for things, and with a disregard of the strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions, as ideal as the ‘plastic virtue,’ and other phantoms of the middle ages.