Nor will the development theory do better, when it would account for the diversity of instincts which prevail in the animal kingdom. The instincts, indeed, it assumes as the cause of all their diversity of structural organization. But this is to beg the whole question. Geology carries us back to the beginnings of organic life, when animals, each after their kind, were already perfected, and endowed with a ready-made apparatus for the particular sphere of existence assigned them. The polypi are still a distinct race, unvarying in their instincts, not the least improved in the building art, still piling up reefs, and doing the same thing which they did when first created. The nautilus has lived through all time, swimming his fragile bark as dextrously over the Silurian seas as he now does amidst the breakers of the Pacific. The cephalopoda and the finny tribes then warred against each other, and ever since they meet in mortal conflict. The same with all the great families which were successively brought upon the stage: species and genera have changed, the old withdrawn, and new ones introduced; but in their respective orders—reptiles, insects, birds, and quadrupeds—the type ever continues, and the instincts remain; and there is no nearer an approximation to or crossing of each other’s domains now, than when first summoned into being. Were the development theory true in nature, and the epochs of geology the myriads of ages assumed, the presumption would be, that the old primitive forms would have been all obliterated and figures of creatures substituted, all of the most remote and indistinct analogies. The _monodal_ races, why have they not all passed away? Had the reptiles sprung from fishes, why, upon the principle of progression, should there be fishes still? Had man derived his parentage from the monkey, why are there so many species of the one class, and only a single great family of the other? The vegetable tribes have been equally true to their kind—the fucoids and algæ, still abundant in the seas—the pines of Mar forest, rivaling in coniferous qualities the most gigantic of the oldest relics—and the palms and fern trees of Australia maintaining the very types that flourished in the carboniferous era.