ORGANIC EVOLUTION. M 



in the general fact, that of all the thousands of 

 specific forms of life which palaeontology reveals 

 to us as having lived on this planet in times 

 past, there is no instance of a highly organised 

 form occurring low down in the geological series. 1 

 On the contrary, there is the best evidence to 

 show that since the first dawn of life in the 

 occurrence of the simplest organisms, until the 

 meridian splendour of life as now we see it, 

 gradual advance from the general to the special 

 — from the low to the high, from the few and 

 simple to the many and complex — has been the 

 law of organic nature. And of course it is need- 

 less to say that this is precisely the law to which 

 the process of descent with adaptive modifica- 

 tion would of necessity give rise. 



1 Some of the lower vertebrata (Elasmobranch and Ganoid fishes) 

 occur, indeed, in early strata (upper Silurian) ; but still far from the 

 earliest in which some of the invertebrata are found. The general 

 statement in the text applies chiefly to the more highly organised 

 forms of the vertebrate series. 



