5 o MODERN IDEAS OF EVOLUTION 



close dependence on biological and geological science, 

 which studies the nature and succession of organic 

 forms without ascertaining their origin ; either hypo 

 thesis, may, however, appeal to scientific facts as more 

 or less according with the consequences which might 

 be expected to follow from the origins supposed. 

 It is further evident that, should evolutionists be 

 driven by natural facts to admit the sudden apparition 

 of organic forms rather than their gradual develop 

 ment, there may be no apparent difference, as to 

 matter of fact, between such sudden apparition and 

 creation, so that science may become absolutely silent 

 on the question. 



Paleontology has indeed recently tended to bring 

 the matter into this position, as Barrande and others 

 have well shown, fl have myself elsewhere adduced 

 the advent of the Cambrian trilobites, of the Silurian 

 cephalopods, of the Devonian fishes, of the Carboni 

 ferous batrachians, land snails and myriapods, of the 

 marsupial mammals of the Mesozoic and the placental 

 mammals of the Eocene, and of the Palaeozoic and 

 modern floras, as illustrations of the sudden swarm 

 ing in of forms of life over the world, in a manner in 

 dicating flows and ebbs of the creative action, incon 

 sistent with Darwinian uniformity, and perhaps un 

 favourable to any form of evolution ordinarily heldjf 



1 In England, Davidson, Jeffreys, Williamson, Carruthers, and 

 other eminent naturalists have strongly insisted on the tendency of 

 palseontological facts to prove permanence of type and inteimittent 



