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PLANCHETTE*
function and structure, supposed, cannot result in the formation
of something fundamentally different from that which has been
thus modified. It lias been shown, that it is not the possession
of speech which constitutes man’s superiority over the animal
world, but the faculty of spiritual perception ; the exercise of
which underlies both human language and every other phase
of culture by which man is distinguished. This is a power
wholly dissimilar from any the animal world possesses; and
no modification, therefore, of the animal organization could
evolve it.
“ Reference to ‘a plan of ascensive development ’ will not
meet the difficulty when ‘new and special endowments’ are
admitted; for, according to the principle laid down by Herbert
Spencer, that ‘ function is antecedent to structure,’ those endow'-
ments can exist only in response to a preceding functional ten¬
dency. This principle, moreover, directly contradicts the
reasoning of Professor Huxley, that a functional difference
which is ‘ vastly unfathomable, and truly infinite in its conse¬
quences,’ has arisen from a small structural change. The modi¬
fication of the organism must have been preceded by that of the
function ; and as the latter is itself dependent on something
which the lower animals do not possess, it is absolutely impossi¬
ble that either the function or the structural differences which it
precedes can have been evolved simply out of an animal organi¬
zation. . . .
“There must be an antecedent functional tendency, or there
can be no formation of organic material, much less of a spe¬
cialized organism. The very fact of the existence of organisms,
so different in their vital phenomena, as the animal and the
plant, both of which are made up of the same chemical ele¬
ments, proves the existence of tzvo different fundamental tenden¬
cies, which cannot be explained by any peculiarity of combination
of those elements, since the function is antecedent to all such
combination, and directive of the form it shall take. Suppos¬
ing, then, specific organized forms are accompanied by peculiar
arrangement of their chemical elements, which take the form