Difficulties in the Evolutionist View 99 



the palaeontologists supposed. Many of the genea- 

 logical trees which Haeckel was so fond of drawing 

 have fallen to pieces. Who can say anything, except 

 in a general way, regarding the ancestry of Birds or 

 even Vertebrates? We are only nibbling at the pro- 

 visional description of how most of the great lifts in 

 evolution may have been effected. The fact of evolu- 

 tion stands more firmly than ever; the uncertainties 

 in regard to the factors are immense. The Origin of 

 Species was published in 1859, but who to-day has 

 attained to clearness in regard to the origin of any 

 single species, i.e., a discontinuous group of similar 

 individuals, breeding true (in the main) inter se, but 

 not readily fertile with other species ? 



As Professor Bateson sa}^s in his Problems of Ge- 

 netics (1918, p. 97) : "Ideas which in the abstract are 

 apprehended and accepted with facility fade away 

 before the concrete case. It is easy to imagine how 

 Man was evolved from an Amoeba, but we cannot 

 form a plausible guess as to how Veronica agrestis 

 and Veronica polita were evolved, either one from the 

 other, or both from a common form. We have not even 

 an inkling of the steps by which a Silver Wyandotte 

 fowl descended from Gallus bankiva, and we can 

 scarcely even believe that it did." Perhaps the agnosti- 

 cism of this quotation from one of our leading inves- 

 tigators is extreme, but it is \isef ul in suggesting the 

 unpleasant truth that the confidence of the past, in- 

 cluding our own, was "chiefly founded on ignorance." 



In view of polemical disputations we must repeat 



