792 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Nelson to turn his blind eye to the recalling signal of his admiral. 

 But it is not a brave thing quite the contrary in any man to 

 turn a blind eye to the, instinctive perceptions of his own intelli- 

 gence. 



Nevertheless, it is possible to be true and faithful to the auto- 

 matic workings of mind within us when it recognizes and iden- 

 tifies the methods of its own vaster image in the external world, 

 and yet to be not less true and faithful to our consciousness of 

 ignorance. The great thing to do is to put our agnosticism not in 

 the wrong but in the right place. We may well rejoice in the 

 clear and grand vision we have obtained through science of or- 

 ganic life having been developed through unnumbered ages on 

 lines which do in themselves constitute a " plan." We may re- 

 joice with the truest intellectual delight in our perception of the 

 relation which this plan bore from the beginning to the future in 

 creation. We may admire without ceasing the combination in 

 this plan between an obvious fundamental unity and a not less 

 obvious fundamental subordination to endless change wherever 

 new needs had to be met and new functions had to be discharged. 

 All this is science and science of the highest quality; but the 

 sense of it is compatible with a constant remembrance of the 

 enormous gaps in our knowledge which remain unfilled. That 

 which always we are most curious to know remains always also 

 unexplained. Geology has told us of a succession in the forms of 

 life ; but it has as yet told us nothing as to the methods by which 

 this succession was brought about. There are, indeed, so-called 

 " links" ; but the links are never within each other's touch. The 

 " imperfection of the record " is blamed for this ; but there are 

 portions of the record which seem continuous and complete por- 

 tions of time which were long enough to see the introduction of 

 new species and yet the mystery remains unsolved. In the Lias, 

 for example, and in some other formations, we have beds of great 

 thickness following each other in orderly and undisturbed suc- 

 cession. New shells appear in turn, and yet we never see how or 

 whence they came. My friend Mr. Robert Etheridge, F. R. S., 

 F. G. S.,* informs me that there is one bed no thicker than an or- 

 dinary mantel-piece in which a peculiar ammonite appears and 

 never appears again. So it is throughout the record wherever it 

 is accessible to us. New forms come like apparitions, and like 

 apparitions they also go. We do not know where such new forms 

 have arisen nor how. We do know that the whole series must 

 have begun somewhere and at some time, in some initial opera- 

 tion which was not that of ordinary generation. We do not 

 know that this initial operation has never been repeated, or, 



* Assistant Keeper Geological Department British Museum (Natural History). 



