30 WORLD-MAKING 



separate areas at one and the same time, is too often repeated 

 to be accidental. Hence palaeontologists, in endeavouring to 

 establish evolution, have been obliged to assume periods of 

 exceptional activity in the introduction of species, alternating 

 with others of stagnation, a doctrine differing very little from 

 that of special creation, as held by the older geologists. 



The attempt has lately been made to account for these breaks 

 by the assumption that the geological record relates only to 

 periods of submergence, and gives no information as to those of 

 elevation. This is manifestly untrue. In so far as marine life 

 is concerned, the periods of submergence are those in which 

 new forms abound for very obvious reasons, already hinted ; but 

 the periods of new forms of land and fresh-water life are those 

 of elevation, and these have their own records and monuments, 

 often very rich and ample, as, for example, the swamps of the 

 Carboniferous, the transition from the great Cretaceous sub- 

 sidence, when so much of the land of the Northern Hemisphere 

 was submerged, to the new continents of the Tertiary, the 

 Tertiary lake-basins of Western America, the Terraces and 

 raised beaches of the Pleistocene. Had I time to refer in 

 detail to the breaks in the continuity of life which cannot be 

 explained by the imperfection of the record, I could show at 

 least that nature in this case does advance per saltum by 

 leaps, rather than by a slow continuous process. Many able 

 reasoners, as Le-Conte, in America, and Mivart and Collard in 

 England, hold this view. 



Here, as elsewhere, a vast amount of steady conscientious 

 work is required to enable us to solve the problems of the 

 history of life. But if so, the more the hope for the patient 

 student and investigator. I know nothing more chilling to re- 

 search, or unfavourable to progress, than the promulgation of 

 a dogmatic decision that there is nothing to be learned but a 

 merely fortuitous and uncaused succession, amenable to no 

 law, and only to be covered, in order to hide its shapeless and 



