4 Objections to the Successive Development Theory. 



of the mammalia were as well represented as now, and by 

 species as highly organized ; whether we turn to the Lower, 

 or to the Middle, or to the Upper Eocene periods, or to the 

 Miocene or Pliocene ; so that during five or more changes, 

 in this the highest class of vertebrata, not a single step was 

 made in advance, tending to fill up the chasm which sepa- 

 rates the most highly gifted of the inferior animals and man. 



Eleventhly^ the geological proofs that the human species 

 was created after the zoological changes above enumerated 

 are very strong. It even appears that man came later upon 

 the earth than the larger proportion of the animals and plants 

 which are now his contemporaries. Yet, for reasons above 

 stated, had the date of his origin been earlier by several 

 periods, the event would have constituted neither a greater 

 nor a less innovation, on the previously established state of 

 the animate world. In other words, there are no palaeonto- 

 logical grounds for believing that the mammiferous fauna 

 after being slowly developed for ages had just reached its 

 culminating point, and made its nearest approach in organi- 

 zation, instinct, and other attributes, to the human type, 

 when the progressive intellect and the rational and moral 

 nature of man became for the first time connected with the 

 terrestrial system. 



The question then which Sir Charles proposes to test by the 

 recent discoveries of geology and palseontology is this : — 



First, whether in the animal kingdom the cephalopod, fish, 

 reptile, bird, and warm-blooded quadruped made their ap- 

 pearance upon the earth, one after the other, — the Orthoceras 

 occurring in the oldest Silurian strata, the fish in the upper 

 Silurian and Devonian, the reptile in the carboniferous, the 

 bird in the triassic, the earliest quadrupedal mammifer in the 

 oolitic, and the first quadrumanous mammal in the tertiary, 

 and lastly, man in the post-tertiary era ; — a series, if esta* 

 blished, which would seem almost irresistibly to lead us to 

 the inference that a gradual advance towards a more perfect 

 organization, or at least to an organization more and more re- 

 sembling that of man, was intimately connected with geologi- 

 cal chronology, the creation of the human species constituting 

 the last term in a regular series of organic developments. 



