PHILLIPS AND DARWIN 253 



tants of oceanic islands ; the affinities and classification of 

 organic beings and their arrangement in groups ; the 

 strange fact of a member of one group being adapted to 

 the habits of another group ; the facts of morphology or 

 homology; embryology and rudimentary organs. If you 

 think the theory of Natural Selection does not to a large 

 extent explain these classes of facts, I have not a word to 

 say. Pray forgive me saying a word in favour of my own 

 offspring to one whom I consider an important judge. 

 " Yours very sincerely, 



" C. DARWIN." 



That Phillips betrayed no bigoted opposition to the 

 doctrine of evolution is shown by several attempts which 

 he himself subsequently made to construct a phylogeny 

 of different groups of animals from a knowledge of their 

 fossil remains ; but while he succeeded in tracing several 

 interesting lines of descent among species, he confessed 

 himself unable to bring the more widely-separated groups 

 or genera into an ancestral connexion. Since these early 

 attempts of Phillips, we have learned not only to affiliate 

 species and genera, but even families and orders, and the 

 frequent discovery of missing links offers the most striking 

 testimony to the truth of the theory of evolution. 



That Phillips was thoroughly justified in his position 

 towards evolution is suggested by the fact that even 

 Huxley, the most philosophic advocate of the theory, 

 fully admitted that at the time of publication of the 

 " Origin," palaeontology lent to its doctrine no support. 



An argument which evidently had great weight with 

 Phillips, in his rejection of the theory of natural selec- 

 tion, was the excessive duration that it postulated for 

 geological time. This still remains an argument of 

 weight, so that some biologists impressed with the vast 

 periods which the Darwinian theory demands for its 



