Mr. Lyell's brilliant and popular work, _The Principles of Geology_, must have introduced to the knowledge of most of my readers the strange theories of Lamarck. The ingenious foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts, which prove that, to a certain extent, the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders of being towards the superior; and that the offspring of creatures low in the scale in the present time, may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descendants of the _ourang-outang_, for instance, may be employed in some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to describe the remains of the _quadrumana_ as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some huge salamander or crocodile of the Lias, might indulge, consistently with his theory, in the pleasing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of his grandfather--a grandfather removed, of course, to a remote degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few hundred thousand _great-greats_. Never yet was there a fancy so wild and extravagant but there have been men bold enough to dignify it with the name of philosophy, and ingenious enough to find reasons for the propriety of the name.