Origin of Species Variorum

Comparison with 1860

process of modification, how it is that the more ancient forms of life often present characters in some slight degree intermediate between existing groups. A few old and intermediate parent-forms having occasionally transmitted to the present day descendants but little modified, will give to us our so-called osculant or aberrant groups. The more aberrant any form is, the greater must be the number of connecting forms which on my theory have been exterminated and utterly lost. And we have some evidence of aberrant forms having suffered severely from extinction, for they are generally represented by extremely few species; and such species as do occur are generally very distinct from each other, which again implies extinction. The genera Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, for example, would not have been less aberrant had each been represented by a dozen species instead of by a single one; but such richness in species, as I find after some investigation, does not commonly fall to the lot of aberrant genera. We can, I think, account for this fact only by looking at aberrant forms as failing groups conquered by more successful competitors, with a few members preserved by some unusual coincidence of favourable circumstances.

Mr. Waterhouse has remarked that, when a member belonging to one group of animals exhibits an affinity to a quite distinct group, this affinity in most cases is general and not special: thus, according to Mr. Waterhouse, of all Rodents, the bizcacha is most nearly related to Marsupials; but in the points in which it approaches this order, its relations are general, and not to any one marsupial species more than to another. As the points of affinity of the bizcacha to Marsupials are believed to be real and not merely adaptive, they are due on my theory to inheritance in common. Therefore we must suppose either that all Rodents, including the bizcacha,