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makes it as hard to comprehend them intelligibly in any degree, on the assumption of
primary or direct creation of species, as it was diffiult for Copernicus to understand
and explain the vast accession of astronomical facts in his day, on the belief of the sub-
servient relation of sun to earth, of the posteriority of the creation of the luminary to
that of the light-receiver, and of their respective relations of motion, as then held. To
the objection, how, on his assumption of the diurnal rotation of the earth, loose things
remained on its surface, Copernicus could offer no explanation. Neither has the
biologist been able, as yet, to explain how the Ramphorhynchus became transmuted
into the Archeopteryx. It is open, of course, to deny such change, or that the
feathered class has been, in any way, a development of an unfeathered one. But if
speculation on the origin of Aves by secondary law be allowable, the extinct volant
forms of the Reptilia offer a much more likely point of departure than the extinct
heavy quadrupedal and terrestrial forms of the cold-blooded class. And if we restrict
our survey to a narrower field, where conditions of life and of structure are surer and
more abundant, and so speculate on the genesis of Didus or Dinornis, guiding or reining
the roaming fancy by facts, the geographical limitation of such ornithicnitoid species,
and their primitive association exclusively with creatures of which they could have
no dread, suggest the more obvious and intelligible hypothesis of derivation from
antecedent birds of flight, whose wings they still show more or less aborted, according
to Buffon's principle of transmutation by degeneration -- witha progressive pre-
dominance of the legs over the wings, ultimately resulting, agreeably with the
Lamarckian view, in a maximization of the terrestrial and abortion of the aerial
instruments of locomotion.
EN