FOSSIL PEDIGREES 115 



sea bottom can be expanded enough to lift it 20,000 feet, as 

 would be necessary in parts of the Indian Ocean, to form a 

 Gondwana land; so one must assume that light rocks re- 

 place heavy ones beneath a million square miles of ocean 

 floor. Even with unlimited time, it is hard to imagine a 

 mechanism that could do the work, and no convincing geologi- 

 cal evidence can be brought forward to show that such a thing 

 ever took place. . . . The distribution of plants and animals 

 should be arranged for by other means than by the wholesale 

 elevation of ocean beds to make dry land bridges for them." 

 (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1916, pp. 269-271.) 



A seventh anomaly of palaeontological phylogeny is what 

 may be described as contrariety of direction. We are asked to 

 believe, for example, that in mammals racial development re- 

 sulted in dimensional increase. The primitive ancestor of 

 mammoths, mastodons, and elephants is alleged to have been 

 the Moeritherium, "a small tapirlike form, from the Middle 

 Eocene Qasr-el-Sagha beds of the Fayum in Egypt. . . . 

 Moeritherium measured about 3V2 feet in height." (Lull: 

 Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1908, pp. 655, 656.) The ancestor of 

 the modern horse, we are told, was ''a little animal less than 

 a foot in height, known as Eohippios, from the rocks of the 

 Eocene age." (Woodruff: "Foundations of Biology," p. 361.) 

 In the case of insects, on the other hand, we are asked to 

 believe the exact reverse, namely, that racial development 

 brought about dimensional reduction. "In the middle of the 

 Upper Carboniferous periods," says Anton Handlirsch, "the 

 forest swamps were populated with cockroaches about as long 

 as a finger, dragonfly-like creatures with a wing spread of about 

 2y2 feet, while insects that resemble our May flies were as 

 big as a hand. ("Die fossilen Insekten, und die Phylogenie 

 der recenten Formen," 1908, L. c, p. 1150.) Contrasting one 

 of these giant palaeozoic dragonflies, Meganeura monyi Brongn., 

 with the largest of modern dragonflies, Aeschna grandis L., 

 Chetverikov exclaims with reference to the latter: "What a 

 pitiful pigmy it is and its specific name (grandis) sounds like 



