ORGANIC EVOLUTION 55 



evolution. It is the stream of movement in an orderly 

 development, in which millions and trillions of integra- 

 tions, and dissipations occur, only a tiny part of which 

 is seen by the eye of man. This part consists only of 

 that which is useful to him in the little act he plays, 

 upon one of the smallest globes of the universe. He 

 never sees the artist. 



PALEONTOLOGY. Paleontology does not disclose the 

 beginnings of life. It reaches back in animal life only 

 to the evolution of organisms with hard bodies. The 

 fossil evidence from plant life is less complete than 

 from animal life. The former reaches back into the 

 geology of the earth much further, however, than does 

 the latter. The fossil forms of plants of the earliest 

 epochs must be rather obscure, and the origin of them 

 is not in evidence. They lacked the bony parts char- 

 acteristic of animals, by which fossil forms of the 

 latter are preserved in the rocks of the earth. 



EXAMPLES OP FOSSIL FORMS. Darwin says that the 

 evidences from geology are few and scattered; that 

 only a small portion of the earth's crust has been 

 penetrated, and that fossil remains are not so satisfac- 

 tory as he could wish. But, when he was in South 

 America, during the voyage of the Beagle, he noticed 

 that the fossil species, of the region, were only modifi- 

 cations of the living species. The evidences have in- 

 creased largely, and at the present time, there are groups 

 of the deer tribe, of the horse, and many others. The 

 first ruminants were without horns. The first fossil 

 antelopes in the middle Miocene had tiny horns. These 

 increased in size in the later epochs, until the present. 

 There is a progressive development of fossil deer horns 

 from the lower Miocene to the present. In fact, fossil- 

 ized animals show the evolution of form from the earliest 



