1870 PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 9 



able to come over. Let me know if you can, 1hat I may 

 secure you good quarters. 



I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half -sheet 

 But for Heaven's sake don't be angry with me in English 

 again. It's far worse than a scolding in Deutsch, and I 

 have as little forgotten my German as I have my German 

 friends. 



On February 18 lie delivered his farewell address 1 

 to the Geological Society, on laying down the office 

 of President. He took the opportunity to revise his 

 address to the Society in 1862, and pointed out the 

 growth of evidence in favour of the evolution theory, 

 and in particular traced the paleontological history of 

 the horse, through a series of fossil types approaching 

 more and more to a generalised ungulate type and 

 reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or collateral 

 of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of 

 the two other toes which appertain to the average 

 quadruped. 



If (he said) the expectation raised by the splints of 

 the horses that, in some ancestor of the horses, these 

 splints would be found to be complete digits, has been 

 verified, we are furnished with very strong reasons for 

 looking for a no less complete verification of the ex- 

 pectation that the three-toed Plagiolophus-like, " avus " of 

 the horse must have been a five-toed "atavus" at some 

 early period. 



Six years afterwards, this forecast of paleon 

 tological research was to be fulfilled, but at the 

 expense of the European ancestry of the horse. A 



1 " Paleontology and the Doctrine of Evolution," Coll. Ess. viii. 



