276 CLARKE— THE AGE OF THE EARTH. 



the help of mutations, variations, or variants, the problem of the 

 factors which have controlled their production, does not belong to 

 paleontology. Bateson, speaking recently at Toronto, has expressed 

 the conviction that after the nearly three quarters century since the 

 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species we are still in doubt and 

 darkness as to the causes of the origin of species. Incautious as it 

 seems, that expression would still be a hopeful one if it means that 

 in this relatively brief period the study of this theme, stimulated by 

 Darwin, has led to the elimination of an extensive array of supposed 

 factors, so that if the buried treasure, if it is really the treasure he 

 has thought, has not yet been found, at least some of the brush has 

 been cleared away from about the place where it lies hid. Both 

 laborers, those in the field of living nature and those delving among 

 the past creation, see the engrossing fact of evolution, but see it out 

 of different eyes ; the former perhaps as one would see a vast throng 

 gathered together to acclaim a momentous event, a great victory or a 

 high armistice ; the latter as an endless army marching by, its van- 

 guard already out of sight in the mists of the horizon, stragglers along 

 the way falling back or giving up in hopelessness, while the intermi- 

 nable procession ever emerges out of the shadow. 



Once upon a time, when Walcott was first bringing out his won- 

 derfully specialized Cambrian fossils from the Burgess shale, I said 

 to the discoverer in a jocular way, " Keep on and you may find the 

 remains of a Cambrian man." In the recent address referred to, 

 Bateson ventures more solemnly into this field. " It has been asked 

 [I am quoting] how do you know, for instance, that there were no 

 mammals in paleozoic times? May there not have been mammals 

 somewhere on the earth though no vestige of them has come down 

 to us ? We may feel confident there were no mammals then, but are 

 we sure? In very ancient rocks most of the great orders of animals 

 are represented. The absence of others might by no great stress of 

 imagination be ascribed to accidental circumstances." Considering 

 that these remarks were made in the presence of a great body of 

 scientific men, among whom were paleontologists, I fear the speaker 

 neglected to do what he should have done and as Artemas Ward was 

 wont to do in like case, for in no evidence from any quarter, whether 



