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Show 486 CONCLUSION. CHAP. XIV. and instinct as the summing up of ~any contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly In the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen ; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become ! A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, ~n correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth. The study of domestic productions will rise immensely in value. A new variety raised by man will be a far more important and interesting subject for study than one more species added to the infinitude of already recorded species. Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies ; and will t~en truly give what may be called the plan of cr~atwn. The rules for classifying will no doubt become simpler when we have a definite object in view. We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to di.scover and trace the many diverging lines of descent In our natural genealogies, by characters of any kind whi~h have long been inherited. Rudimentary organs will speak infallibly with respect to the natn:e of l~ng-lost structures. Species and groups of spemes, which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be called living fossils, will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life. Embryology will reveal to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototypes of each great class. When we can feel assured that all the .individu.als of the same species, and all the closely allied spe.mes of most genera, have within a not very remote penod de- CHAP. XIV. CONCLUSION. 487 scend~d from one parent, and have migrated from some one b1rthpla?e; ~nd when we better know the many means of migratwn, then, by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on former changes of climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely be enabled to trace in an admirable manner the former migrations of the inhabitants of the whole world. Even at present, by comparing the differences of the inhabitants of the sea on the opposite sides of a continent, and the nature of the various inhabitants of that c?ntinent in. relation to their apparent means of immigration, some hght can be thrown on ancient geography. The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual concurrence of circumstances, and the blank intervals between the successive stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic forms. We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as strictly contemporaneous two formations, which include few identical species, by the general succession of their forms of life. As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation and by catastrophes; and as the most important of all causes of organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely, the mutual relation of organism to organism,-the improvement of one being entailing the improvement or the extermination of |
