42 THE PAST CONDITION 



animals, taking them altogether, you will not, at the out- 

 side estimate, find above ten or a dozen extinct. Summing 

 up all the orders of animals which have left remains 

 behind them, you will not find above ten or a dozen which 

 cannot be arranged with those of the present day ; that 

 is to say, that the difference does not amount to much 

 more than ten per cent. : and the proportion of extinct 

 orders of plants is still smaller. I think that that is a very 

 astounding, a most astonishing fact, seeing the enormous 

 epochs of time which have elapsed during the constitution 

 of the surface of the earth as it at present exists ; it is, 

 indeed, a most astounding thing that the proportion of 

 extinct ordinal types should be so exceedingly small. 



But now, there is another point of view in which we must 

 look at this past creation. Suppose that we were to sink 

 a vertical pit through the floor beneath us, and that I 

 could succeed in making a section right through in the 

 direction of New Zealand, I should find in each of the 

 different beds through which I passed the remains of 

 animals which I should find in that stratum and not in 

 the others. First, I should come upon beds of gravel 

 or drift containing the bones of large animals, such as the 

 elephant, rhinoceros, and cave tiger. Rather curious 

 things to fall across in Piccadilly 1 If I should dig lower 

 still, I should come upon a bed of what we call the London 

 clay, and in this, as you will see in our galleries upstairs, 

 are found remains of strange cattle, remains of turtles, 

 palms, and large tropical fruits ; with shell-fish such 

 as you see the like of now only in tropical regions. If I 

 went below that, I should come upon the chalk, and 

 thru- I should find something altogether different, the 

 remains of ichthyosauri and ptcrodactyles, and ammonites, 

 and so forth. 



I do not know what Mr. Godwin Austin would say comes 

 next, but probably rocks containing more ammonites, and 

 more ichthyosauri and plesiosauri, with a vast number 

 of other things ; and under that I should meet with yet 

 older rocks, containing numbers of strange shells and 

 fishes ; and in thus passing from the surface to the lowest 

 depths of the earth's crust, the forms of animal life and 

 vegetable life which I should meet with in the successive 

 would, looking at them broadly, be the more different 

 r thrr that I went down. Or, in other words, inasmuch 

 as we started with the clear principle, that in a series of 



