VICTORY AND REST 167 



gest that whole systems of creation had been swept away 

 en bloc, and remade again in different forms for a suc- 

 ceeding epoch, in accordance with the belief which was 

 almost universal among geologists up to the exact mo- 

 ment of the publication of Darwin's masterpiece. 



During the twenty-one years, too, as Huxley like- 

 wise pointed out, an immense number of new facts had 

 come to strengthen the hands of the evolutionists at 

 the very point where they had before felt themselves 

 most openly vulnerable. Palaeontology had supplied 

 many of those missing links in the organic chain whose 

 absence from the interrupted and imperfect geological 

 record had been loudly alleged against the Darwinian 

 hypothesis in the earlier days of struggle and hesita- 

 tion. Two years after the publication of the ' Origin 

 of Species,' the discovery of a winged and feathered 

 creature, happily preserved for us in the Solenhofen 

 slates, with li:ard-like head and teeth and tail, and 

 bird-like pinions, feet, and breast, had bridged over in 

 part the great gap that yawns between the existing 

 birds and reptiles. A few years later, new fossil 

 reptilian forms, erect on their hind legs like kangaroos, 

 and with very singular peculiarities of bony structure, 

 had helped still further to show the nature of the modi- 

 fications by which the scale-bearing quadruped type 

 passed slowly into that of the feather-bearing biped. 

 In 1875, again, Professor Marsh's discovery of the 

 toothed birds in the American cretaceous strata com- 

 pleted the illustrative series of transitional forms over 

 what had once been the most remarkable existing break 

 in the continuity of organic development. Similarly, 

 Hofmeister's investigations in the vegetable world 



