EVIDENCES OF EVOLUTION. 137 



In the first edition of his " Origin of Species " Dar- 

 win wrote: "We may thus account even for the 

 distinctness of whole classes from each other for 

 instance, of birds from all other vertebrated animals, 

 by the belief that many animal forms of life have 

 been utterly lost, through which the early progeni- 

 tors of birds were formerly connected with the 

 early progenitors of other vertebrate classes." 



At the time this prophecy was made there was 

 no positive evidence of the existence of such inter- 

 calated forms as Darwin required. Three years 

 later the archaopteryx was discovered, meeting 

 completely all the requirements of theory. Subse- 

 quent discoveries, notably by Marsh, disclosed other 

 transitional forms which "bridge over the gap be- 

 tween reptiles and birds, in this sense, that they en- 

 able us to picture to ourselves forms from which 

 both birds and reptiles as we know them could have 

 sprung." 



In his lecture on the Evolution of the horse, in 

 1876, Prof. Huxley spoke as follows: "Thus, thanks 

 to these important researches [those of Marsh and 

 other paleontologists], it has become evident that 

 so far as our present knowledge extends, the history 

 of the horse type is exactly and precisely that which 

 could have been predicted from a knowledge of the 

 principles of Evolution. And the knowledge we now 

 possess justifies us completely in the anticipation 

 that, when the still lower Eocene deposits, and 

 those which belong to the Cretaceous epoch, have 

 yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, 

 we shall find first, a form with four complete toes, 



