ON THE PEDIGREE OF THE CORAL-REEFS OF ENGLAND. 203 
‘2. There is no evidence of any gradual development 
having taken place in the class from a lower to a higher 
type of coraligenous structures. The old corals of the 
ancient reefs appear to have been as highly organised and 
as elaborately constructed as the modern corals now building 
reefs in our tropical seas.* The Cretaceous corals belong 
chiefly to families now existing, but there are still remaining 
here a very few instances of the old forms of tabulate corals, 
hardly distinguishable from Silurian species.” 
The life-history of fossil corals, therefore, so far as it can 
be gathered from the remains of their edifices, teaches us 
that there has been no transformation of those creatures by 
effluxion of time alone. 
The facts prove the simultaneous introduction of whole 
platforms of organic life by some means unknown to science. 
There is a record which states this to have been effected 
by acts of direct creation. Science, with an admission of 
its helplessness, must bow before this. We must say with 
Goethe :— 
* None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness. 
Therefore, a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed. 
Yes ; a sacred enigma.” 
Sir Wiliam Dawson, the accomplished President of the 
British Associatiou in 1886, says :—“It is certain that, up to 
this time, the origination of the living being from the non- 
living is an inscrutable mystery. No one has witnessed this 
change, or has been able to effect it.” 
That Evolution is an unsupported theory is admitted by an 
eminent French scientist, who is, nevertheless, a favourer of the 
doctrine. Speaking of the coral-reefs, he says :—“ The first 
corals, Halysites and others of the primitive genera, differ 
too widely from those which have succeeded them to allow us 
to consider them as their progenitors.”+ But he adds the 
gratuitous supposition that, alongside of the germs which 
we do find, lived others which we do not, which contained 
small modifications whereby the change took place,—a 
supposition unscientific and improbable to the last degree, 
considering the complete overhauling which the fossil-bearing 
beds have received. 
Dr. Claus, the learned evolutionary physiologist, admits the 
insufficiency of this theory to account for the facts, and tries 
* Proceedings of Cotswold Naturalists’ Field Club, p. 120. 
t+ Les Enchainements du Monde Animal, par Alfred Gaudry, p. 78. 
WOM.) RT Q 
