PHYLOGENY AND PALEONTOLOGY 357 



archetype represents the ancestral form ; both reject the 

 simplicist conception of a monophyletic evolution (which 

 may be likened to the ' one animal " idea of the trans- 

 cendentalists) ; both admit the possibility that evolution has 

 taken place along many separate and parallel lines, and 

 explain the correspondences shown by these separate lines 

 by the similarity of the intrinsic laws of evolution ; finally, 

 both emphasise the fact that we know nothing of the actual 

 course of evolution save the few indications that are 

 furnished by palaeontology, and both insist upon the unique 

 importance of the palaeontological evidence. 1 



It was a curious but very typical characteristic of 

 evolutionary morphology that its devotees paid very little 

 attention to the positive evidence accumulated by the 

 palaeontologists, 2 but shut themselves up in their tower of 

 ivory and went on with their work of constructing ideal 

 genealogies. It was perhaps fortunate for their peace of 

 mind that they knew little of the advances made by 

 palaeontology, for the evidence acquired through the study 

 of fossil remains was distinctly unfavourable to the pretty 

 schemes they evolved. 



As Neumayr, Zittel, Deperet, Steinmann and others have 

 pointed out, the palaeontological record gives remarkably 

 little support to the ideal genealogies worked out by 

 morphologists. There is, for instance, a striking absence of 

 transition forms between the great classificatory groups. A 

 few types are known which go a little way towards bridging 

 over the gaps the famous Archczopteryx, for example but 

 these do not always represent the actual phylogenetic links. 

 There is an almost complete absence of the archetypal 

 ancestral forms which are postulated by evolutionary 

 morphology. Amphibia do not demonstrably evolve from 

 an archetypal Proamphibian, nor do mammals derive from 

 a single generalised Promammalian type. Few of the 

 hypothetical ancestral types imagined by Haeckel have ever 



1 This is also emphasised by Fleischmann in his critical study of 

 evolutionary morphology entitled Die Descendenztheorie, Leipzig, 1901. 



The same remark applies to the bulk of speculation as to the 

 factors of evolution, with the exception of the contributions made to 

 evolution theory by the palaeontologists by profession, such as Cope. 



