COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



and followed by systems destroyed as fast as 

 they were formed, but also that the systems 

 thus destroyed coincided with the periods which 

 must have been richest in transitional forms. 



But notwithstanding the extreme imperfec- 

 tion of the geological record, and notwithstand- 

 ing these special difficulties in the way of find- 

 ing transitional forms, such forms are frequently 

 met with. Indeed it may be asserted, as one of 

 the most significant truths of palaeontology, that 

 extinct forms are almost always intercalary be- 

 tween forms now existing. Not only species, 

 genera, and families, but even orders of con- 

 temporary animals, apparently quite distinct, 

 are now and then fused together by the discov- 

 ery of extinct intermediate forms. In Cuvier's 

 time, horse, tapir, pig, and rhinoceros were 

 ranked as a distinct order from cow, sheep, 

 deer, buffalo, and camel. But so many transi- 

 tional forms have been found in tertiary strata 

 that pachyderms and ruminants are now united 

 in a single order. By numerous connecting links 

 the pig is now seen to be closely united with 

 the camel and the antelope. Similar results re- 

 lating to the proboscidians, the hyaena family 

 of carnivora, the apes, the horse, and the rhi- 

 noceros, have been obtained from the explora- 

 tion of a single locality near Mount Pentelikos 

 in Greece. Among more than seventy species 

 there discovered, the gradational arrangement 



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