Variation, Geographical Distribution, and Succession. 91 



passed througli the ordeal of all the hard extremities it involved, 

 bearing his organs of locomotion and digestion all but unchanged. 

 Taking the group of four European fossil species above enume- 

 ratedj do they show any signs in the successive deposits of a 

 transition from the one form into the other ? Here, again, the 

 result of my observation, in so far as it has extended over the 

 European area, is, that the specific characters of the molars are 

 constant in each, within a moderate range of variation, and that 



we nowhere meet with intermediate forms/^ Dr. Falconer 



continues (p. 80) : — 



"The inferences which I draw from these facts are not opposed 

 to one of the leading propositions of Darwin's theory. With him, I 

 have no faith in the opinion that the Mammoth and other extinct 

 Elephants made their appearance suddenly, after the type in which 

 their fossil remains are presented to us. The most rational view seems 

 to be, that they are in some shape the modified descendants of earlier 

 progenitors. But if the asserted facts be correct, they seem clearly 

 to indicate that the older Elephants of Europe, such as E. meridionalis 

 and E. antiquus, were not the stocks from which the later species, 

 E. primigenius and E. africanus, sprang, and that we must look 

 elsewhere for their origin. The nearest affinity, and that a very 

 close one, of the European E. meridionalis is with the Miocene E. 

 planifrons of India, and of E. primigenius with the existing Indian 

 species, 



" Another reflection is equally strong in my mind — that the means 

 which have been adduced to explain the origin of species by ' natural 

 selection,' or a process of variation from external influences, are 

 inadequate to account for the phenomena. The law of phyllotaxis, 

 which governs the evolution of leaves around the axis of a plant, is 

 as nearly constant in its manifestation as any of the physical laws 

 connected with the material world. Each instance, however dif- 

 ferent from another, can be shown to be a term of some series of 

 continued fractions. When this is coupled with the geometrical law 

 governing the evolution of form, so manifest in some departments of 

 the animal kingdom (e. g. the spiral shells of the Mollusca), it is 

 difficult to believe that there is not in nature a deeper-seated and 

 innate principle, to the operation of which natural selection is 

 merely an adjunct. The whole range of the Mammalia, fossil and 

 recent, cannot furnish a species which has had a wider geographical 

 distribution, and passed through a longer term of time, and through 

 more extreme changes of climatal conditions, than the Mammoth. 

 If species are so unstable, and so susceptible of mutation through 

 such influences, why does that extinct form stand out so signally a 

 monument of stability? By his admirable researches and earnest 

 writings, Darwin has, beyond all his cotemporaries, given an impulse 

 to the philosophical investigation of the most backward and obscure 

 branch of the biological sciences of his day : he has laid the founda- 

 tions of a great edifice ; but he need not be surprised if, in the pro- 



