SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 835 * 



and one demanding even some suspension of the ordinary laws of 

 nature. 



Certain recent utterances of eminent scientific men in England and 

 France are most instructive with reference to the difficulties which 

 encompass this subject. Huxley, at present the leader of English 

 evolutionists, in his " Rede Lecture " * delivered at Cambridge, Eng- 

 land, holds that there only two " possible alternative hypotheses " as 

 to the origin of species : 1. That of " construction," or the mechanical 

 putting together of the materials and parts of each new species sepa- 

 rately ; and, 2. That of "evolution," or that one form of life "pro- 

 ceeded from another " by the " establishment of small successive dif- 

 ferences." After comparing these modes, much to the disadvantage 

 of the first, he concludes with the statement that " this was his case 

 for evolution, which he rested wholly on arguments of the kind he 

 had adduced " ; these arguments being the threadbare false analogy 

 of ordinary reproduction and the transformation of species, and the 

 mere succession of forms more or less similar in geological time, neither 

 of them having any bearing whatever on the origin of any species or 

 on the cause of the observed succession. With reference to the two 

 alternatives, while it is true that no certain evidence has yet been 

 obtained either by experiment, observation, or sound induction as 

 to the mode of origin of any species, enough is known to show that 

 there are numerous possible methods, grouped usually under the heads 

 of absolute creation, mediate creation, critical evolution, and gradual 

 evolution. It is also true that almost the only thing we certainly 

 know in the matter is, that the differences characteristic of classes, 

 orders, genera, and species, must have arisen, not in one or two, but 

 in many ways. An instructive commentary on the capacity of our 

 age to deal with these great questions is afforded by the fact that this 

 little piece of clever mental gymnastic should have been practiced in 

 a university lecture and in presence of an educated audience. It is 

 also deserving of notice that, though the lecturer takes the develop' 

 ment of the Nautili and their allies as his principal illustration, he 

 evidently attaches no weight to the argument in the opposite sense 

 deduced by Barrande the man of all others most profoundly ac- 

 quainted with these animals from the palaeozoic cephalopods. 



Another example is afforded by a lecture recently delivered at the 

 Royal Institution in London by Professor Flower. f The subject is, 

 " The Whales, Past and Present, and their Probable Origin." The lat- 

 ter point, as is well known, Gaudry has candidly given up. " We have 

 questioned," he says, " these strange and gigantic sovereigns of the 

 tertiary oceans as to their ancestors they leave us without reply." 

 Flower is bold enough to face this problem ; and he does so in a fair 

 and vigorous way, though limiting himself to the supposition of slow 

 and gradual change. He gives up at once, as every anatomist must, 

 * Report in " Nature," June 21st, corrected by the author, f Reported in " Nature." 



