194 DARWINIANA. 



of physical changes which our planet has undergone 

 since the Neozoic epoch, we can nowhere detect signs 

 of a revolution more sudden and pronounced, or more 

 important in its results, than the intercalation and 

 sudden disappearance of the glacial period. Yet the 

 ' dicy cloth erian' mammoth lived before it, and passed 

 through the ordeal of all the hard extremities it in- 

 volved, bearing his organs of locomotion and digestion 

 all but unchanged. Taking the group of four Euro- 

 pean fossil species above enumerated, do they show 

 any signs in the successive deposits of a transition 

 from the one form into the other ? Here again the 

 result of my observation, in so far as it has extended 

 over the European area, is, that the specific characters 

 of the molars are constant in each, within a moderate 

 range of variation, and that we nowhere meet with 

 intermediate forms." .... Dr. Falconer continues 

 (page 80): 



" The inferences which I draw from these facts are not 

 opposed to one of the leading propositions of Darwin's theory. 

 With him, I have no faith in the opinion that the mammoth 

 and other extinct elephants made their appearance suddenly, 

 after the type in which their fossil remains are presented to us. 

 The most rational view seems to be, that they are hi some shape 

 the modified descendants of earlier progenitors. But if the 

 asserted facts be correct, they seem clearly to indicate that the 

 older elephants of Europe, such as E. meridionalis and E. anti- 

 quus, were not the stocks from which the later species, E. primi- 

 genius and E, Africanus sprung, and that we must look else- 

 where for their origin. The nearest affinity, and that a very 

 close one, of the European E. meridionalis is with the Miocene 

 E. planifrons of India ; and of E. primigenius, with the exist- 

 ing India species. 



"Another reflection is equally strong in my mind that the 



