without olfactory nerves, while the rest of the cetacea and even fishes
have them: there must be a reason which determines this.
Individual real exceptions to this universal law of design in organised
nature have indeed been discovered, and with great surprise; but in these
cases that _exceptio firmat regulam_ applies, since they can be accounted
for upon other grounds. Such, for example, is the fact that the tadpoles
of the pipa toad have tails and gills, although, unlike all other
tadpoles, they do not swim, but await their metamorphosis on the back of
the mother; that the male kangaroo has the marsupial bones which in the
female carry the pouch; that male mammals have breasts; that the _Mus
typhlus_, a rat, has eyes, although very small ones, without any opening
for them in the outer skin, which thus covers them, clothed with hair; and
that the moles of the Apennines, and also two fishes—_Murena cœcilia_ and
_Gastrobrauchus cœcus_—are in the same case; of like kind is the _Proteus
anguinus_. These rare and surprising exceptions to the rule of nature,
which is otherwise so rigid, these contradictions with itself into which
it falls, we must explain from the inner connection which the different
kinds of phenomena have with each other, by virtue of the unity of that
which manifests itself in them, and in consequence of which nature must
hint at some thing in one, simply because another of the same type
actually has it. Accordingly the male animal has a rudimentary form of an
organ which is actually present in the female. As now here the difference
of the _sex_ cannot abolish the type of the _species_, so also the type of
a whole order—for example, of the batrachia—asserts itself even where in
one particular species (pipa) one of its determinations is superfluous.
Still less can nature allow a determination (eyes) which belongs to the
type of a whole division (Vertebrata) to vanish entirely without a trace,
even if it is wanting in some particular species (_Mus typhlus_) as
superfluous; but here also it must at least indicate in a rudimentary
manner what it carries out in all the others.