modification from some earlier form which had the normal
number of toes, and the persistence of the rudimentary bones which no
longer support toes in the horse becomes comprehensible.

In the language that we speak in England, and in the language of the
Greeks, there are identical verbal roots, or elements entering into the
composition of words. That fact remains unintelligible so long as we
suppose English and Greek to be independently created tongues; but when
it is shown that both languages are descended from one original, the
Sanscrit, we give an explanation of that resemblance. In the same way
the existence of identical structural roots, if I may so term them,
entering into the composition of widely different animals, is striking
evidence in favour of the descent of those animals from a common
original.

To turn to another kind of illustration:--If you regard the whole
series of stratified rocks--that enormous thickness of sixty or seventy
thousand feet that I have mentioned before, constituting the only record
we have of a most prodigious lapse of time, that time being, in all
probability, but a fraction of that of which we have no record;--if you
observe in these successive strata of rocks successive groups of animals
arising and dying out, a constant succession, giving you the same kind
of impression, as you travel from one group of strata to another, as
you would have in travelling from one country to another;--when you find
this constant succession of forms, their traces obliterated except to
the man of science,--when you look at this wonderful history, and ask
what it means, it is only a paltering with words if you are offered the
reply,--'They were so created.'

But if, on the other hand, you look on all forms of organized beings as
the results of the gradual modification of a primitive type, the facts
receive a meaning, and you see that these older conditions are the
necessary predecessors of the present. Viewed in this light the facts of
palaeontology receive a meaning--upon any other hypothesis, I am unable
to see, in the slightest degree, what knowledge or signification we are
to draw out of them. Again, note as bearing upon the same point, the
singular likeness which obtains between the successive Faunae and
Florae, whose remains are preserved on the rocks: you never find any
great and enormous difference between the immediately successive Faunae
and Florae, unless you have reason to believe there ha