86 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



of the way the different types have arisen; and any conclu- 

 sion based on the existence of such a series might very well 

 be entirely erroneous, for the fact that such a series exists 

 bears no relation to the order in which its members have ap- 

 peared." {Op. cit., pp. 12, 13.) Such facts must give us 

 pause in attaching undue importance to phenomena like the 

 occurrence of a gradual complication of sutures in the Chalk 

 Ammonites, particularly as parallel series of perfectly similar 

 sutures occurs ''by convergence" in the fossil Ceratites, which 

 have no genetic connection with the Ammonites. (Cf. Woods^ 

 'Talseontology," 5th ed., p. 16.) 



But, if even mutational and specific intergradents are not 

 sufiicient evidence of common ancestry, what shall we say of 

 a discontinuous series, whose links are separate genera, orders, 

 or even classes, instead of species. Even the most enthusi- 

 astic transformist is forced to admit the justice of our insistence 

 that the gaps which separate the members of a series must be 

 reduced from differences of the generic, to differences of the 

 specific, order, before that series can command any respect as 

 hypothetical "genealogy." "You will have observed," says F. 

 A. Bather, "that the precise methods of the modern palaeontol- 

 ogist, on which this proof is based, are very different from the 

 slap-dash conclusions of forty years ago. The discovery of Ar- 

 chceopteryx, for instance, was thought to prove the evolution 

 of birds from reptiles. No doubt it rendered that conclusion 

 extremely probable, especially if the major promise — that evo- 

 lution was the method — were assumed. But the fact of evolu- 

 tion is precisely what men were then trying to prove. These 

 jumpings from class to class or from era to era, by aid of a 

 few isolated stepping-stones, were what Bacon calls anticipa- 

 tions "hasty and premature but very effective, because as 

 they are collected from a few instances, and mostly from those 

 which are of familiar occurrence, they immediately dazzle 

 the intellect and fill the imagination." {Nov. Org., I, 28.) 

 No secure step was taken until the modem palaeontologist 

 began to affiliate mutation with mutation and species with 



