To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown cause.

It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore.

Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.

Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied.

But whenever we have the means of instituting a comparison, the same laws appear to have acted in producing the lesser differences between varieties of the same species, and the greater differences between species of the same genus.