LIFE AND ORGANISATION. 75 



tact ; filling up, more or less, thereby the void places in the 

 series of genera and species before known. 



Other arguments there are,, but these lie at the root of the 

 question, and may be taken instar omnium. In pursuing 

 the controversy, one party has found it needful to assume, 

 and the other to allow, an unlimited license as to time. We 

 do not go over the geological proofs as to this matter, now 

 become so familiar to all. It is enough to repeat, that prior 

 to man and all the creatures occupying the world with him, 

 there have existed on the earth successive and separate con- 

 ditions of animal and vegetable life, as faithfully recorded in 

 the rocky cemeteries below us, as if they were the creation and 

 destruction of our own day. Though the order of succes- 

 sion is distinct here, no human estimate can reach the period 

 of time these successions involve ; so vast is it, and so broken 

 by intermediate changes to which no measure can apply. 

 In one sense then, that of the existence of life on the earth, 

 time has no numerical limit which we can assign. But the 

 advocate for transmutation of species must take it, subject to 

 a question as to the nature of these intermediate changes or 

 catastrophes. If they be such as to close one epoch of life 

 on the globe before the creation or commencement of another, 

 then the argument, as far as time is concerned, must be 

 limited to that latest epoch in which we are now placed. 

 Many of the gaps in the structural scale have been filled up, 

 indeed, from the fossil remains of former periods ; but until 

 some series can be shown connecting these periods together 

 without breach of continuity, the hypothesis of developement 

 or transmutation cannot fairly borrow time from these an- 

 terior epochs, for the changes it presumes. 



Nor does it really lose much by this limitation. The fossil 

 remains of former ages of life afford no evidence as to trans- 

 mutation of species, which may not as plausibly be drawn 

 from the existing animal creation. We find the same general 



