EVOLUTION THE RESULT OF CHEMICAL FORCES. 99 



tage enough in this circumstance to enable those with the dan- 

 gling toe to run out and supercede all those that had their four 

 toes planted square on the ground ? And then how many varia- 

 tions in this one direction, and how many exterminations of the 

 race must have occurred before the Mesohippus came in with 

 three clean toes on all his feet ? It lias always seemed to me 

 that the commonly described processes of evolution, depend- 

 ing solely on the slow accumulation of slight advantageous 

 variations, were entirely too inadequate, and the chances against 

 their continued operation in one direction too infinitely great, to 

 make them worthy of any consideration as a part of nature's 

 means for bringing about the great advances in organic structure. 

 It will be shown subsequently that this same process of evolv- 

 ing races of one and two hoof-toed animals out of the five toed, 

 was gone all through with by another and entirely independent 

 order, the marsupials, long before the placental mammalia started 

 out on the same course. Furthermore, at the same time that the 

 one-toed horse was being evolved on the western plains of 

 America, precisely the same development was going forward in 

 the Tertiaries of Europe, with the Atlantic ocean rolling between. 

 The Anchithere found, in the Miocene of Europe was a tapir-like 

 animal of the size of a sheep, with three hoof-toes to each foot. 

 The Hipparion found in later strata in France and Germany, 

 had grown to the size of the ass, and had the middle hoof much 

 enlarged, with the side hoofs withdrawn upward and no longer 

 serviceable. Besides the fully developed horse, these are the 

 only hippoid forms that have been found in Europe ; but they 

 are sufficient to show that the horse was independently evolved 

 on both sides of the Atlantic and at about the same time. It 

 appears then that this slow and laborious task of constructing the 

 most specialized and valuable quadruped in existence, is a process 

 that nature has often gone through with. It seems to be one of 

 the diverging lines that development is obliged to take, as if to 

 accomplish some predestined purpose. And it is a little singular 

 in this connection to note that all of man's useful domestic animals 

 are of the single and double hoofed varieties. Moreover it has 

 often been claimed that civilization would have been an impossi- 



