sts; or rather, as, growing
bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to
us, from one single head:--

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL
ANIMALS and PLANTS have descended from some one prototype. But analogy
may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in
common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their
cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction....

Therefore I shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic
beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course
included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life
was first breathed by the Creator.--p. 484.

This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast,
creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct
descendants of some one individual _ens_, whose various progeny have
been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable
conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us.
This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to
arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and
flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and
venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal
descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the
nucleated cell of some primaeval fungus, which alone possessed the
distinguishing honour of being the "one primordial form into which life
was first breathed by the Creator "--this, to say the least of it, is no
common discovery--no very expected conclusion. But we are too loyal
pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by
reason of its strangeness. Newton's patient philosophy taught him to
find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of
the stars in their courses; and if Mr. Darwin can with the same
correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we
shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of
philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms,--

Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed,

--only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the
argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we
are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation,
or the spa