xviii PREFACE 



Yet this is what has happened. The geological 

 record reveals to-day many times the number of 

 finished forms which it contained when Darwin wrote, 

 yet it still remains a tabula rasa in regard to inter- 

 mediate forms. Nothing intervenes between the 

 molluscs and crustaceans to help us to understand 

 whence and how the first fish forms were evolved, 

 nothing between fishes and the first bird forms 

 and the first mammals to indicate how they were 

 built up. 



The condition of the geological record shrieks out 

 the most emphatic refutation of Darwin's doctrine of 

 Natural Selection as the evolutionary power of Nature. 



There are no means of evading or escaping from 

 the conclusion that if there has been a physical 

 evolution from lower to higher forms of organic life, 

 its processes must have been of so rapid a character 

 as to leave no impress of them on the sands of time. 



But even the most rapid form of evolution of 

 which I can conceive or conjecture fails to account 

 for, or even render remotely explicable, the sudden 

 appearance among heterogeneous organisms of 

 finished fish forms, finished bird forms, and finished 

 mammals. 



These considerations to me, a lifelong evolutionist, 

 have proved of a highly disconcerting nature ; for I 

 have always taught myself to regard the doctrine of 

 evolution from lower to higher organic forms as a 

 more elevated conception of creative energy than 

 would be the direct intervention of Deity through 



