PALAEONTOLOGY AND GEOLOGY 



evolutionist to the dogma of the prescience of Natural 

 Law. So far as I can learn evolutionists have wisely 

 and persistently avoided the solution of this problem. 

 Although we have neglected, so far, plant evo- 

 lution, the radical change in plant forms which 

 occurred without previous transitional links in the 

 Cretaceous period when the angiosperms, plants with 

 seeds enclosed in an ovary, suddenly appeared as the 

 dominant type of flora, is one of the impossible ques- 

 tions to explain by evolution. Darwin was keenly in- 

 terested in this, to him, inexplicable problem. He 

 writes to Hooker: "Nothing is more extraordinary in 

 the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to 

 me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt devel- 

 opment of the higher plants [angiosperms]. I have 

 sometimes speculated whether there did not exist 

 somewhere during long ages an extremely isolated 

 continent, perhaps near the South Pole."'^ It must be 

 great necessity which would make a cautious induc- 

 tive man of science create a whole continent in order 

 that angiosperms might develop in complete isolation 

 from the rest of the world, and then join this con- 

 tinent to the other land systems so that this new type 

 of plants may spread rapidly over all the world. It 

 has been a favourite device for social reformers to in- 

 vent an island, isolated from the rest of the confused 

 world, where an ideal type of society has developed 

 and flourished. Thus, we have the Utopia of Thomas 



21 Darwin, Life and Letters, vol. II, p. 424. 



c 157 n 



