Note 48 — Chapter V · EVOLUTION.

Has any advocate of the hypothesis that animals were created as we see them now, fully formed and wondrously adapted in all their parts to the conditions in which they live, ever considered the hind legs of the seal, which he may have watched in the Zoölogial Gardens? Here is an animal which habitually swims like a fish, and cannot use his hind limbs except as a rudder to propel him through the water; but instead of having a fish-like tail he has two legs flattened together, and nails on the toes—toes and nails being obvious superfluities. Now which is the more rational interpretation, that these limbs, in spite of their non-adaptation, were retained in rigid adherence to a Plan, or that the limbs were inherited from an ancestor who used them as legs, and that these legs have gradually become modified by the fish-like habits of the seal?