With the many insects which imitate various objects, there is no improbability in the belief that an accidental resemblance to some common object was in each case the foundation for the work of natural selection, since perfected through the occasional preservation of slight variations which made the resemblance at all closer; and this will have been carried on as long as the insect continued to vary, and as long as a more and more perfect resemblance led to its escape from sharp-sighted enemies.

In certain species of whales there is a tendency to the formation of irregular little points of horn on the palate; and it seems to be quite within the scope of natural selection to preserve all favourable variations, until the points were converted, first into lamellated knobs or teeth, like those on the beak of a goose--then into short lamellae, like those of the domestic ducks--and then into lamellae, as perfect as those of the shoveller-duck--and finally into the gigantic plates of baleen, as in the mouth of the Greenland whale.

In the family of the ducks, the lamellae are first used as teeth, then partly as teeth and partly as a sifting apparatus, and at last almost exclusively for this latter purpose.

With such structures as the above lamellae of horn or whalebone, habit or use can have done little or nothing, as far as we can judge, towards their development.