ANCIENT SLATE-INSCRIPTIONS. 59 



to corroborate his views in the history of Graptolites, 

 especially if he be willing to take the moderate 

 position preferred by many Christian students of 

 science, namely, that creation was by method or 

 process Divine law or even law of Nature it may 

 be called operating sometimes slowly, as we see 

 it, and at other times rapidly, as though by special 

 manifestations of creative energy. In those remote 

 ages in which Graptolites flourished, types of life 

 seem to have swept in one after the other in waves, 

 as if some Supreme Power were forcing them on. 

 The leading groups of Palaeozoic animals, Molluscs, 

 Crustaceans, Fishes, Reptiles, seem to have had no 

 ancestors, and can only be linked on to each other 

 by creations of the human imagination and by 

 supposing such vast geological blanks as we have 

 no right to take for granted. These views are 

 amplified by Professor Dawson in his Chain of 

 Life, from which the following quotation may fitly 

 be taken as the conclusion of this chapter : " The 

 progress of life is not gradual but intermittent, and 

 consists in the sudden and rapid influx of new forms 

 destined to increase and multiply in the place of 

 those which are becoming effete and ready to vanish 

 away or to sink to a lower place. Further, since 

 the great waves of aquatic life roll in with each 

 great subsidence of the land, a fact which coincides 

 with their appearance in the limestones of the 

 successive periods, it follows that it is not a struggle 

 for existence, but expansion under favourable cir- 

 cumstances, the opening up of new fields of 

 migration that is favourable to the introduction 



