280 NATURAL. SCIENGE. APRIL, | 
stages of its life, and of those that involve unnecessary expenditure, 
such as a spinous stage in an Ammonite intervening between two 
costate stages. These explanations of the falsification of the epitome 
are barely alluded to by Mr. Hurst; for since, on a priori grounds, he 
denies any epitome whatsoever, he naturally does not stay to enquire 
whether he may not have sometimes been misled by these obscura- 
tions of it. So far, then, as Mr. Hurst is concerned, it is idle to 
discuss these matters, we must rather seek for flaws in his original 
argument. 
His main fallacy appears to me to be simply this, that he substi- 
tutes contemporary relations for ancestors. After stating Von Baer’s 
law, which obviously refers to existing species, co-existing, that is, 
and therefore not derived the one from the other, he proceeds to say: 
—‘‘If similar comparisons could be instituted between an ancestral 
species and its much modified descendants, there is no reason for 
doubting that a similar result would be reached.” But there is all 
the difference in the world between filial and fraternal relationship, 
and though Von Baer’s law is undoubtedly true of the latter, there 
are many objections to supposing that it is equally true of the former. 
The only evidence that Mr. Hurst condescends to offer is the quota- 
tion from Darwin, which is, indeed, one part in favour of himself, but 
the other six parts in favour of his opponents. 
Mr. Hurst seems to suppose that on the Recapitulation Theory 
a bird should begin life as a fish, then change to a lizard or other 
reptile, and finally burst into a bird. Such a harlequinade has never 
been imagined. The bird of to-day must be compared, not with the 
reptile of to-day, but with the bird of the past, and that in its turn 
with a form which may have had very few of the characters of reptiles 
as we now know them; as for fish, it is as likely as not that they 
barely entered into the phylogeny at all. Those who keep a more 
observant eye on the progress of vertebrate palwontology than I have 
leisure to do must surely have observed how day by day the ancestral 
stocks are pushed further and further back, so that the connecting 
link between, or common ancestor of, the great divisions cannot 
possibly be dragged into the discussion. 
To glance at another example of Mr. Hurst’s—the three gnats 
Culex, Covethra, and Chironomus, forms which, though alike in the adult, 
are dissimilar in the larval stage. Of course, it is possible that these 
genera may really be descended from a common ancestor, and that 
variation has chiefly affected the early stages. If so, it is clearly 
impossible that those early stages can reveal to us the past history of 
the genera in question. Such cases as this are admitted by every- 
one; they are consistent with the Recapitulation Theory, and as 
Mr. Hurst makes no further capital out of them, it is hard to see why 
he introduced them at all. On the other hand, instances are known, 
as in the Ammonites Dumortievia and Grammoceras, of adults which 
resemble one another so closely that they would actually be taken for 
