324 STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS 



increase the difficulties of accounting for the whole phenomena 

 of evolution. 



In a recent and remarkable inaugural address, at Oxford, by 

 the President of the British Association, Lord Salisbury stated 

 that mathematicians do not grant the time of 'many hundred 

 millions of years ' for the transformation of a Jelly-fish into a Man. 

 ' Lord Kelvin limited the period of organic life upon the earth to a 

 hundred million years ; ' and Professor Tait further cut down the 

 time from a hundred to ten million. 



Without admitting that these mathematicians, like the Pope, 

 are infallible, and without admitting that my particular Jelly-fish 

 was ever converted into a Man, it is evident that if monstrosities, 

 or, in other words, large and sudden variations, were admitted as 

 possible factors in the creation of species, by the method of 

 evolution, the time needed for the transformation of. the lower into 

 the higher organisms would be much curtailed. A writer in the 

 Saturday Review of nth August 1894, commenting on Lord 

 Salisbury's address, says : ' But are the demands of the two parties 

 (physicists and biologists) necessarily as incompatible as Lord 

 Salisbury seems to suppose ? If the passage from the condition of 

 a protozoon to that of a vertebrate, in the case of an individual, can 

 be accomplished in a very few months, is it so certain that similar 

 changes have always been so extremely slow in the history of a 

 race ? ' 



