ucture of the pterodactyle as independently educed, and
having relation to physiology only. This conception is one which harmonizes
completely with the views here advocated, and with those of Mr. Herbert
Spencer, who also calls in direct modification to the aid of "Natural
Selection." That merely minute, indefinite variations in all directions
should unaided have independently built up the shoulder structure of {73}
the pterodactyles and carinate birds, and have laterally depressed their
optic lobes, at a time so far back as the deposition of the Oolite
strata,[56] is a coincidence of the highest improbability; but that an
innate power and evolutionary law, aided by the corrective action of
"Natural Selection," should have furnished like needs with like aids, is
not at all improbable. The difficulty does not tell against the theory of
evolution, but only against the specially Darwinian form of it. Now this
form has never been expressly adopted by Professor Huxley; so far from it,
in his lecture on this subject at the Royal Institution before referred to,
he observes,[57] "I can testify, from personal experience, it is possible
to have a complete faith in the general doctrine of evolution, and yet to
hesitate in accepting the Nebular, or the Uniformitarian, or the Darwinian
hypotheses in all their integrity and fulness."

[Illustration: THE ARCHEOPTERYX (of the Oolite strata).]

It is quite consistent, then, in the Professor to explain the {74}
difficulty as he does; but it would not be similarly so with an absolute
and pure Darwinian.

Yet stronger arguments of an analogous kind are, however, to be derived
from the highest organs of sense. In the most perfectly organized
animals--those namely which, like ourselves, possess a spinal column--the
internal organs of hearing consist of two more or less complex membranous
sacs (containing calcareous particles--otoliths), which are primitively or
permanently lodged in two chambers, one on each side of the cartilaginous
skull. The primitive cartilaginous cranium supports and protects the base
of the brain, and the auditory nerves pass from that brain into the
cartilaginous chambers to reach the auditory sacs. These complex
arrangements of parts could not have been evolved by "Natural Selection,"
_i.e._ by minute accidental variations, except by the action of such
through a vast period of time; nevertheless, it was fully evolved at the
time of the deposition of the u