76 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



in time to another form of life is, in itself, no proof of descent. 

 "Let us suppose," says Bather, "all written records to be 

 swept away, and an attempt made to reconstruct English 

 history from coins. We could set out our monarchs in true 

 order, and we might suspect that the throne was hereditary; 

 but if on that assumption we were to make James I, the son 

 of Elizabeth — well, but that's just what palaeontologists are 

 constantly doing. The famous diagram of the Evolution of 

 the Horse which Huxley used in his American lectures has 

 had to be corrected in the light of the fuller evidence recently 

 tabulated in a handsome volume by Prof. H. F. Osborn 

 and his coadjutors. Palceotherium, which Huxley regarded as 

 a direct ancestor of the horse, is now held to be only a col- 

 lateral, as the last of the Tudors were collateral ancestors of 

 the Stuarts. The later Ancitherium must be eliminated from 

 the true line as a side branch — a Young Pretender. Some- 

 times an apparent succession is due to immigration of a distant 

 relative from some other region — 'The glorious House of Han- 

 over and Protestant Succession.' It was, you will remember, 

 by such migrations that Cuvier explained the renewal of life 

 when a previous fauna had become extinct. He admitted suc- 

 cession but not descent." {Science, Sept. 17, 1920, p. 261.) 

 But, if succession does not imply descent, descent, at least, 

 implies succession, and the fact that succession is the necessary 

 corollary of descent, may be used as a corrective for the erro- 

 neous allocations made by neontologists on the basis of purely 

 morphological considerations. The priority of a type is the 

 sine qua non condition of its being accepted as ancestral. It 

 is always embarrassing when, as sometimes happens, a "de- 

 scendant" turns out to be older than, or even coeval with, his 

 "ancestor." If, however, the historical position of a form can 

 be made to coincide with its anatomical pretensions to ancestry, 

 then the inference of descent attains to a degree of logical 

 respectability that is impossible in the case of purely zoologi- 

 cal evidence. Recent years have witnessed a more drastic 

 application of the historical test to morphological speculations, 



