72 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



"new creation," the irregularity in question would then be re- 

 ferable to the Creator Himself, and such derogations of order 

 are inadmissible, except as manifestations of the supernatural. 

 In fact, the abrupt and capricious insertion of a "new crea- 

 tion" into an order already constituted, say, for instance, the 

 sudden introduction of Angiosperms in the Comanchian period, 

 or of mammals in the Tertiary, would be out of harmony 

 with both reason and revelation. Unless there is a 

 positive reason for supposing the contrary, we must pre- 

 sume that, subsequent to the primordial constitution of 

 things, the Divine influence upon the world has been 

 concurrent rather than revolutionizing. Hence a theory 

 of origins, compatible with the simultaneous "creation" of 

 primal organisms, is decidedly preferable to a theory, which 

 involves successive "creations" at random. That transform- 

 ism dispenses with the need of assuming a succession of "crea- 

 tive" acts, is perfectly obvious, and, unless fixism can emulate 

 its rival system in this respect, it cannot expect to receive 

 serious attention. 



But once fixism assumes the simultaneousness of organic 

 origins, it encounters, in the absence of modern organic types 

 from ancient geological strata, a new and formidable difficulty. 

 Cuvier's theory of numerous catastrophes followed by whole- 

 sale migrations of the forms, which had escaped extinction, is 

 tantamount to an appeal to the extraordinary and the im- 

 probable for purposes of explanation, and this, as we have seen, 

 is an expedient, which natural science is justified in refusing 

 to sanction. Nor does the appeal to the incompleteness of 

 the geological record offer a more satisfactory solution. It is 

 tax enough, as we shall see, upon our credulity, when the 

 transformist seeks to account thereby for the absence of inter- 

 mediate types, but to account in this fashion for the absence 

 of palaeozoic Angiosperms and mammals is asking us to be- 

 lieve the all-but-incredible. It would not, therefore, be ad- 

 visable for the fixist to appropriate the line of defense sug- 

 gested for him by Bateson — "It has been asked how do you 



