ON CREATION OR EVOLCTTION. 187 



a little pa6-5f'. In the day in which Dr. Elam wrote it was an 

 old story, and there has been really enough said for it, but 

 there are some very awkward imputations cast upon its 

 character as a credible witness for evolution by Sir William 

 Dawson, whose eminence as an authority will not be ques- 

 tioned. Some woixls of his on this point are so striking that 

 they may be quoted in full. "The worthlessness of such 

 derivation is well shown in a case which has often been 

 paraded as an illustration of evolution— the supposed 

 genealogy of the horse. In America a series of horse-like 

 animals has been selected, beginning with the Eohippus of 

 the Eocene — an animal the size of a fox, and with four toes 

 in front and three behind, and these have been marshalled as 

 the ancestors of the fossil horses of America ; for there are 

 no native horses in America in the modern period, the result 

 of the long series of improvements having apparently been 

 extinction. Yet all this is pru-ely arbitrary, and dependent 

 merely on a succession of genera more and more closely 

 resembling the modern horse, being procurable from succes- 

 sive Tertiary deposits often widely separate in time and 

 place. In Europe, on the other hand, the ancestry of the 

 horse has been traced back to Palaiotherium — an entirely 

 different form — hj just as likely indications, the truth being 

 that as the group to which the horse belongs culminated 

 in the early Tertiary times, the animal has too many 

 imaginary ancestors. Both genealogies can scarcely be true, 

 and there is no actual proof of either. The existing Ameri- 

 can horses, which are of European parentage, are, according 

 to the theory, descendants of Paleeotherium, not of Eohippus ; 

 but if we had not known this on historical evidence, there 

 would have been nothing to prevent us from tracing them 

 to the latter animal. This simple consideration alone is 

 sufficient to show that such genealogies are not of the nature 

 of scientific evidence."* 



Four formidable objections brought against the theory of 

 evolution from palseontological facts in regard to animals, 

 and three in regard to plants,t are mentioned by Romanes. 

 All the former! are met with arguments drawu from '• the 

 imperfection of the record," what could be called " tlie argu- 

 ment from ignorance if used by an opponent, and of the 



* Modera Ideas of Evolution^ p. 119. 



t Darwin and after Darwin, part I, Appendix, p. 435. 



X Origin of Species, 6th edition, p. 267. 



