CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



itants of trees, and these belonged to a very ancient group, 

 retaining certain primitive traits of limbs and teeth which 

 left them far behind the others in evolutionary status. But 

 out of these, largely through mental supremacy, were to 

 come our forebears and, later, actual humanity itself. 



Certain recorded links couple lines which to-day are so 

 divergent that students of recent animals would hardly 

 imagine their relationship. Compare the manatee, of spin- 

 dle-like body, broad swimming tail, flipper-like fore limbs, 

 and no visible hind limbs at all, with the majestic elephant, 

 conspicuous for his peculiar features of limbs, head, and 

 trunk. What community of structure do they show? And 

 yet there has come out of the Libyan desert of Egypt a fossil 

 form that is neither one nor the other but partakes some- 

 what of the nature of both — a synthetic swamp-dwelling 

 type, whose descendants came to the parting of the ways and 

 went severally to the sea and to the land — to grotesque 

 aquatic efficiency on the one hand and to noble terrestrial 

 majesty on the other. Here the link has been found. Were 

 it lost, who could tell the tale of this strange kinship? 



One of the most completely known of all evolutionary 

 chains is that of the horse-like forms, though here again the 

 hypothetical five-toed ancestor is still undiscovered. We 

 could, however, restore him in detail, so complete is our 

 evidence of the course of equine evolution, and, if the chain 

 includes other missing links we can formulate their charac- 

 teristics with mathematical certainty, as well as their distri- 

 bution in time and place. Our material for tracing the 

 horses is so abundant that it resolves itself not into a single 

 chain, but into many, all of which have arisen from the 

 original stock to follow lines that may be closely parallel, or, 

 again, widely divergent, but invariably in response to cli- 

 matic and vegetative environment. Most of these chains 



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