NOTE. 



THERE are many more improbabilities attaching to the 

 belief that living forms, as we see them, are the unaided 

 products of natural selection, when once we attempt to 

 pursue it into detail. As, for instance, we may ask, and 

 it is not easy to give a good answer to the question, how 

 it can ever happen that an ancestral and an evolved type 

 exist at the same time, while the links between the two 

 have perished ? If, for instance, birds have been evolved 

 from reptiles, reptiles from amphibia, and amphibia from 

 fish, why have the intermediate links perished while fish 

 still exist ? ' How come amphibia to coexist with reptiles, 

 if the transitional links between reptiles and amphibia 

 have perished ; because, if their intermediate forms were 

 unable to compete with reptiles, why do amphibia remain ; 

 specially as the earlier stages of transition must have come 

 more irito competition with amphibia than with reptiles ? 

 And the same may be said of reptiles and mammals, the 

 anthropoid apes and man, etc. It may be said that our 

 amphibia are not precise representatives of the original 

 amphibia out of which reptiles were evolved ; but still, for 

 the present purpose, the type amphibia may be considered 

 as one. If the original amphibia, preserving the type 

 amphibia, became so modified as to hold their ground co- 

 existently with their improved descendants the reptiles, 



