Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[391] the genera Anguis, Ophisaurus, and Pseudopus, the Chamosauria, Chirotes, Bipes, Sepo, Scincus, and at last the true lizards. It would seem to any reasonable man that these types are the transformations of a single primitive type, so closely do the modifications approach each other; and yet I now reject any such supposition, and after having studied the facts most thoroughly, I find in them a direct proof of the creation of all these species. It must not be forgotten that the genus Anguis belongs to Europe, the Ophisaurus to North America, the Pseudopus to Dalmatia and the Caspian steppe, the Sepo to Italy, etc. Now, I ask how portions of the earth so absolutely distinct could have combined to form a continuous zoological series, now so strikingly distributed, and whether the idea of this development could have started from any other source than a creative purpose manifested in space? These same purposes, this same constancy in the employment of means toward a final end, may be read still more clearly in the study of the fossils of the different creations. The species of all the creations are materially and genealogically as distinct from each other as those of the different points on the surface of the globe. I have compared hundreds of species