Evolution, Old and New: Or, The Theories of BuffonS. E. Cassino, 1879 - 384 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
action admit animals animals and plants appear become beetles birds body brain breeds Buffon called cause cetacea chapter characters Charles Darwin climate common consequence continues creature descent with modification disuse doctrine domestication effect Erasmus Darwin evolution eyes fact feel fittest forms G. H. Lewes Geoffroy St gradually greater habits hence Hilaire Hist horse Ibid idea individual insects insisted instinct Isidore Geoffroy kind Lamarck less Lichfield living filament maintains manner matter mind Mivart mutability of species natural selection Natural Theology naturalists nerves observe offspring opinion organ Origin of Species parents passage perception perfect Phil Philosophie Zoologique present produced Professor Haeckel purpose quadrupeds reader reason resemblance rock pigeon rudimentary sensation sense structure suppose survival teleology theory of descent things tion toes variations varieties vary vegetable volume wild wings words writes Zool Zoonomia
Popular passages
Page 75 - Is it possible not to think of the following ?— “But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away . . . . and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of
Page 8 - that it was too like the Laputan method of making books, and that it did not sufficiently take into account a continually guiding and controlling intelligence. This seems to me a most valuable and instructive criticism. I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoological
Page 6 - It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to
Page 228 - new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve, by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity world without end!
Page 224 - many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. “As air and water are supplied to animals in sufficient profusion, the three great objects of desire which have changed the forms of many animals by their
Page 231 - from the other? Or as the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals, long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?
Page 12 - and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction ‘and designed its use.
Page 375 - by slow steps to the more and more complete reduction of a part, until at last it became rudimentary—as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabiting dark caverns, and of the wings of birds inhabiting oceanic islands, which have seldom been forced by beasts of prey to take
Page 6 - will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and
Page 43 - his incipient or progressive forms the power of propagating their like in every stage of their alteration; and if he is to be believed, he could replenish the world with all the vegetable and animal productions which we now see in it.” * After meeting this theory with answers which need not detain us, he continues