But are we to conclude that within this vast family which the Creator
has called into existence out of nothing, there are other and smaller
families, projected as it were by Nature, and brought forth by her in
the natural course of events and after a long time, of which some
contain but two members, as the ass and the horse, others many
members, as the weasel, martin, stoat, ferret, &c., and that on the
same principle there are families of vegetables, containing ten,
twenty, or thirty plants, as the case may be? If such families had
any real existence they could have been formed only by crossing, by
the accumulation of successive variations (_variation successive_),
and by degeneration from an original type; but if we once admit that
there are families of plants and animals, so that the ass may be of
the family of the horse, and that the one may only differ from the
other through degeneration from a common ancestor, we might be driven
to admit that the ape is of the family of man, that he is but a
degenerate man, and that he and man have had a common ancestor, even
as the ass and horse have had. It would follow then that every
family, whether animal or vegetable, had sprung from a single stock,
which after a succession of generations had become higher in the case
of some of its descendants and lower in that of others.
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