74 



FACTS AND FANCIES 



of living creatures, we might have the demon- 

 stration desired. But here again the gaps are 

 so frequent and so serious that Haeckel scarcely 

 attempts to use this argument further than by 

 giving a short and somewhat imperfect sum- 

 mary of the geological succession in the begin- 

 ning of his second volume. In this he attempts 

 to give a continuous series of the ancestors of 

 man as developed in geological time ; but, 

 of twenty-one groups which he arranges in 

 order from the beginning of the Laurentian 

 to the modern period, at least ten are not 

 known at all as fossils, and others do not 

 belong, so far as known, to the ages to which 

 he assigns them. This necessity of manufac- 

 turing facts does not speak well for the testi- 

 mony of geology to the supposed phylogeny 

 of man. 



In point of fact, it cannot be disguised that, 

 though it is possible to pick out some series 

 of animal forms, like the horses and camels 

 referred to by some palaeontologists, which 

 simulate a genetic order, the general testimony 

 of palaeontology is, on the whole, adverse to 

 the ordinary theories of evolution, whether 

 applied to the vegetable or to the animal 

 kingdom. This the writer has elsewhere en- 



