to the ultimate purposes of the palace, but wholly with reference to the way in which houses were constructed in ancient times? What should we say to the architect who could not form a museum out of bricks and mortar, but was forced to begin as if going to build a mansion: and after proceeding some way in this direction, altered his plan into a palace, and that again into a museum? Yet this is the sort of succession on which organisms are constructed. The fact has long been familiar; how has it been reconciled with Infinite Wisdom? Let the following passage answer for a thousand:--“The embryo is nothing like the miniature of the adult. For a long while the body in its entirety and its details presents the strangest of spectacles. Day by day and hour by hour the aspect of the scene changes, and this instability is exhibited by the most essential parts no less than by the accessory parts. One would say that Nature feels her way, and only reaches the goal after many times missing the path,--on dirait que la nature tâtonne et ne conduit son œuvre à bon fin qu’après s’être souvent trompée.”[45] Writers have no compunction in speaking of Nature feeling her way and blundering; but if in lieu of Nature, which may mean anything, the Great Architect be substituted, it is probable that the repugnance to using such language of evasion may cause men to revise their conceptions altogether; they dare not attribute ignorance and incompetence to the Creator. 103. Obviously the architectural hypothesis is incompetent to explain the phenomena of organic development. Evolution is the universal process; not creation of a direct kind. Von Baer, who very properly corrected the exaggerations which had been put forth respecting the identity of the embryonic forms with adult forms lower in the scale, who showed that the mammalian embryo never was a bird, a reptile, or a fish, nevertheless emphasized the fact that the mammalian embryo passes through all the lower typical forms; so much so that, except by their size, it is impossible to distinguish the embryos of mammal, bird, lizard, or snake. “In my collection,” he says, “there are two little embryos which I have omitted to label, so that I am now quite incompetent to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards, they may be small birds, or very young mammals; so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of the head and trunk. The extremities have not yet made their appearance. But even if they existed in the earliest stage we should learn nothing from them, for the feet of lizards, mammals, and the wings of birds, all arise from the same common form.” He sums up with his formula: “The special type is always evolved from a more general type.”[46]