Note 69 — Chapter VII

I may be pardoned for taking an example of the confusion of thought which this mode of reasoning has introduced into Biology from a clever article in the Contemporary written by a very able and much-esteemed biologist. He says: "The morphological distance between a newly hatched frog's tadpole and the adult frog is almost as great as that between the adult lancelet and the newly hatched larvæ of the lamprey." The "morphological distance" truly, but what of the physiological distance between the young and adult of the same animal and two adult animals between which is placed the great gulf of specific and generic diversity which within human experience neither has been known to pass?