1 68 CHARLES DARWIN 



brought close together the flowering and flowerless 

 plants, by indicating that the ferns and the horsetails 

 were connected in curious unforeseen ways, through the 

 pill-worts and club-mosses, with the earliest and 

 simplest of forest trees, the firs and the puzzle-monkeys. 

 In minor matters like progress was continually re- 

 ported on every side. Gaudry found among the fossils 

 of Attica the successive stages by which the ancient 

 and undeveloped civets passed into the more modern 

 and specialised tribe of the hyagnas ; Marsh traced out 

 in Western America the ancestry of the horse from a 

 five-toed creature no bigger than a fox, through inter- 

 mediate four-toed and three-toed forms, to the existing 

 single solid-hoofed type with its digits reduced to the 

 minimum of unity ; and Filhol unearthed among the 

 phosphorites of Quercy the common progenitor of the 

 most distinct among the recent carnivores, the cats and 

 the dogs, the plantigrade bears and the digitigrade pumas. 

 ' So far as the animal world is concerned,' Professor 

 Huxley said in conclusion, reviewing these additions to 

 the evidence upon that memorable occasion, ' evolution 

 is no longer a speculation but a statement of historical 

 fact.' Of Darwin himself he remarked truly, ' He has 

 lived long enough to outlast detraction and opposition, 

 and to see the stone that the builders rejected become 

 the head-stone of the corner.' 



It was in 1881 that Darwin published his last 

 volume, ' The Formation of Vegetable Mould through 

 the Action of Worms.' In this singularly fascinating 

 and interesting monograph he took in hand one of the 

 lowliest and humblest of living forms, the common 

 earthworm, and by an exhaustive study of its habits 



