10 THE HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY OF 



witnessed by no one. The prosecutor collects 

 circumstantial evidence in all directions against 

 the accused man, and the greater its amount, the 

 more closely can he press home the accusation. 

 We must deal with the indirect evidence adduced 

 in support of the theory of evolution in the same 

 way. It is derived from comparative morphology, 

 comparative anatomy, comparative history of the 

 evolution of the individual, comparative bionomy, 

 geography of animals, and especially from palaeon- 

 tology. I will refer at once to a few instances 

 derived from this last source of evidence. There are 

 hundreds of kinds of ants, which we know through 

 their having been preserved to us in the tertiary 

 amber of the Baltic and Sicily. Amongst them 

 occur several genera which still exist, but scarcely 

 a species that is identical with the present ones. 

 We can hardly avoid coming to the conclusion 

 that our ants are the descendants of these fossil 

 varieties, and that they have come into being by 

 way of natural evolution of the race, and not by 

 way of a new creation. 



Again, if we compare the fossil termites of the 

 tertiary epoch with those now known to us, we are 

 forced to assume that the latter are modified de- 

 scendants of the former, and that they have come 

 into being by way of natural race evolution, not 

 by way of a new creation. Further, if we consider 

 the oldest of the still existing varieties of termites, 

 viz. the Australian genus Mastotermes, and com- 



