they, however, are never used, and they never come to anything. But
other members of the group to which the whale belongs have
well-developed teeth in both jaws.

Upon any hypothesis of special creation, facts of this kind appear to me
to be entirely unaccountable and inexplicable, but they cease to be so
if you accept Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, and see reason for believing
that the whalebone whale and the whale with teeth in its mouth both
sprang from a whale that had teeth, and that the teeth of the foetal
whale are merely remnants--recollections, if we may so say--of the
extinct whale. So in the case of the horse and the rhinoceros: suppose
that both have descended by modification from some earlier form which
had the normal number of toes, and the persistence of the rudimentary
bones which no longer support toes in the horse becomes comprehensible.

In the language that we speak in England, and in the language of the
Greeks, there are identical verbal roots, or elements entering into the
composition of words. That fact remains unintelligible so long as we
suppose English and Greek to be independently created tongues; but when
it is shown that both languages are descended from one original, the
Sanscrit, we give an explanation of that resemblance. In the same way
the existence of identical structural roots, if I may so term them,
entering into the composition of widely different animals, is striking
evidence in favour of the descent of those animals from a common
original.

To turn to another kind of illustration:--If you regard the whole series
of stratified rocks--that enormous thickness of sixty or seventy
thousand feet that I have mentioned before, constituting the only
record we have of a most prodigious lapse of time, that time being, in