It is only by the accumulation of new and valuable material that the controversy will gradually be brought into a state fit for final decision, and this appears to be for the present of more importance than a repeated analysis of what is already before us. Moreover, it is but fair to leave it to Darwin himself at first to beat off the attacks of his opponents from the splendid structure which he has raised with such a master-hand.
F.M.
DESTERRO, 7th September, 1863.
HISTORY OF CRUSTACEA
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
When I had read Charles Darwin's book ‘On the Origin of Species,’ it seemed to me that there was one mode, and that perhaps the most certain, of testing the correctness of the views developed in it, namely, to attempt to apply them as specially as possible to some particular group of animals. such an attempt to establish a genealogical tree, whether for the families of a class, the genera of a large family, or for the species of an extensive genus, and to produce pictures as complete and intelligible as possible of the common ancestors of the various smaller and larger circles, might furnish a result in three different ways.
1. In the first place, Darwin’s suppositions when thus applied might lead to irreconcilable and contradictory conclusions, from which the erroneousness of the suppositions might be inferred. If Darwin’s opinions are false, it was to be expected that contradictions would accompany their detailed application at every step, and that these, by their cumulative force, would entirely destroy the suppositions from which they proceeded, even though the deductions derived from each particular case might possess little of the unconditional nature of mathematical proof.
2. Secondly, the attempt might be successful to a greater or less extent. If it was possible upon the foundation and with the aid of the Darwinian theory, to show in what sequence the various smaller and larger circles had separated from the common fundamental form and from each other, in what sequence they had acquired the peculiarities which now characterise them, and what transformations they had undergone in the lapse of ages,—if the establishment of such a genealogical tree, of a primitive history of the group under consideration, free from internal contradictions, was possible,—then this conception, the more completely it took up all the species within itself, and the more deeply it enabled us to descend into the details of their structure, must in the same proportion bear in itself the warrant of its truth, and the more convincingly prove that the foundation upon which it is built is no loose sand, and that it is more than merely “an intellectual dream.”
3. In the third place, however, it was possible, and this could not but appear, primâ facie, the most probable case, that the attempt might be frustrated by the difficulties standing in its way, without settling the question, either way, in a perfectly satisfactory manner. But if it were only possible in this way to arrive for oneself at a moderately certain independent judgment upon a matter affecting the highest questions so deeply, even this alone could not but be esteemed a great gain.
Having determined to make the attempt, I had in the first place to decide upon some particular class. The choice was necessarily limited to those the chief forms of which were easily to be obtained alive in some abundance. The Crabs and Macrurous Crustacea, the Stomapoda, the Diastylidæ, the Amphipoda and Isopoda, the Ostracoda and Daphnidæ, the Copepoda and Parasita, the Cirripedes and Rhizocephala of our coast, representing the class of Crustacea with the deficiency only of the Phyllopoda and Xiphosura, furnished a long and varied, and at the same time intimately connected series, such as was at my command in no other class. But even independently of this circumstance the selection of the Crustacea could hardly have been doubtful. Nowhere else, as has already been indicated by various writers, is the temptation stronger to give to the expressions “relationship, production from a common fundamental form,” and the like, more than a mere figurative signification, than in the case of the lower Crustacea. Among the parasitic Crustacea, especially, everybody has long been accustomed to speak, in a manner scarcely admitting of a figurative meaning, of their arrest of development by parasitism, as if the transformation of species were a matter of course. It would certainly never appear to any one to be a pastime worthy of the Deity, to amuse himself with the contrivance of these marvellous cripplings, and so they were supposed to have fallen by their own fault, like Adam, from their previous state of perfection.