not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but
in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an
"interosculant" group, - a party of genera and species which
connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link
in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological
classification. For here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude
form; of which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might say
that the Creative Mind realized it before either Actiniae or
Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it
in two different directions; dividing it into two different
families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking
away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea-
anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, those
strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills,
of which you shall see some anon. Thus there has been, in the
Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a development of the
idea on which older species were created, in order - we may fancy -
that every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, and
there should be no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature's forms.
This development is one which we must believe to be at least
possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and
not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a
Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there
with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine
Mind) all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more.

Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology
has disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought
into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the
work has been gradual; that the earth