IiIFE PROGRESSIVE 



N' O one can doubt that the earth's crust, so far as it has 

 been deciphered by man, presents us with a record, 

 imperfect though it be, of the past. Whether, however, the 

 known and admitted imperfections of its records, geological 

 and palaeontological, are sufficiently trustworthy to account 

 satisfactorily for the lack of direct evidence recognizable in 

 some modern hypotheses, may be a matter of individual 

 opinion, but there can be little doubt that they are sufficiently 

 extensive to throw the balance of evidence decisively in 

 favor of some theory of continuity, as opposed to any 

 theory of intermittent and occasional action, which some 

 writers have strenuously and intelligently advocated. No 

 marks of mighty and general convulsions of nature exist, 

 as the seeming breaks which divide the grand series of 

 stratified rocks into numerous isolated formations would 

 indicate. They are simply indications of the imperfection 

 of our knowledge. Science will never, in all probability, 

 point to a complete series of deposits, or to a complete 

 succession of life, which shall link one geological period to 

 another. But that such deposits and such an unbroken 

 succession must have existed at one time we may well feel 

 sure, and stand ready to believe that nowhere in the long 

 series of fossiliferous rocks has there been a total break, but 

 that there has inevitably been a complete continuity of life, 

 as well as a more or less complete continuity of sedimenta- 

 tion from the Laurentian period to the present day. One 

 generation, speaking figuratively, hands on the lamp of life 

 to the next, and each system of rocks is the direct offspring 



