PROBLEMS OF MODERN SCIENCE 



impossible, from the nature of the case, to 

 arrive at anything approaching exactitude in our 

 estimates, which vary, say, from ioo to iooo 

 million years or more, but a few million years 

 more or less hardly count nowadays ; all that we 

 need concern ourselves about is that there should 

 be time enough, and we have no longer any time- 

 rationing to fear. 



The great advances which Palaeontology has 

 made in recent years consist not so much in the 

 discovery of new types of extinct plants and 

 animals as in the linking together of previously 

 known types in less and less discontinuous series. 



Perhaps the most striking instance is the 

 almost complete elucidation, chiefly in America, 

 of the ancestry of the horse. Similarly, but less 

 completely, the whales and the elephants have been 

 traced back to remote forebears utterly unlike their 

 existing selves. The ancestry of man still remains 

 a much-vexed question, but, after all, it is only 

 matters of detail that are involved in the discussion. 

 Whether, with Huxley, we derive the human stock 

 directly from some ape-like form, or, with Wood 

 Jones, trace it further back to the lemur-like 

 Tarsius before effecting a junction with any other 

 line of descent, makes no difference to the belief, 

 universally accepted by all who are qualified to 

 express an opinion, that man is but the final pro- 

 duct, in one particular direction, of the process of 

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