THE NET RESULT 193 



of types ; Cope and Marsh would have unearthed for 

 our edification the ancestral forms of the evolving horse 

 and the toothed birds of the Western American deposits. 

 The Solenhofen lithographic slates would still have 

 yielded us the half-reptilian, half-avian Archaeopteryx ; 

 the tertiary deposits would still have presented us with 

 a long suite of gradually specialised and modified 

 mammalian forms. The Siberian meadows would have 

 sent us that intermediate creature which Prjevalsky re- 

 cognises as the half-way house between the horses and 

 the donkeys ; the rivers of Queensland would have dis- 

 closed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill- 

 breathing barramunda, in which Giinther discerns the 

 missing link between the ganoid fishes on the one hand, 

 and the mudfish and salamandroid amphibians on the 

 other. From data such as these, biologists and palaeon- 

 tologists of the calibre of Huxley, Gaudry, Geikie, 

 Riitimeyer, and Busk, would necessarily have derived, 

 by the aid of Wallace's pregnant principle, conclusions 

 not so very far remote from Darwin's own. Heer and 

 Saporta would have drawn somewhat similar inferences 

 from the fossil flora of Switzerland and of Greenland ; 

 Hooker and De Candolle would have read pretty much 

 the self-same lessons in the scattered ferns and scanty 

 palm-trees of oceanic islands. Kowalevsky would have 

 seen in the ascidian larva a common prototype of the 

 vertebrate series ; the followers of Von Baer would have 

 popularised the embryological conception of the single 

 origin of animal life. The researches of Boucher de 

 Perthes, of Lyell, of Evans, of Boyd Dawkins, of 

 Keller, and of Christy and Lartet, would have unrolled 

 before our eyes, under any circumstances, the strange 



