DARWIN MEMORIAL. 53 



have all in their turn been denounced ; and not least, chloroform. 

 Its use in parturition has been anathematized as an infraction of the 

 penalty pronounced on Eve!"* It is not I, but a great clergy- 

 man, who expresses such sentiments. 



The objection that the differentation and specialization of organic 

 beings gainsay their derivation from a common source is a most 

 weighty one. In the infancy of our own knowledge it was unan- 

 swerable, and the less we know of nature the more we are impressed 

 with these diversities. It is not, however, simply a question of 

 whether evolution is true ; but which is the more probable of two 

 alternatives — that all the phenomena which point in one direction 

 and which could have occurred in natural sequence, have taken 

 place in such sequence ; or that direct creative intervention has en- 

 sued again and again, when the same ends could have been produced 

 without such intervention. 



Nature was true to her disciple, and herself furnished the replies. 



It was contended that if evolution were true, the evidence should 

 be forthcoming in the existence in previous geological epochs of 

 forms of a generalized character intermediate between still earlier 

 ones and later widely separated forms ; and that of such there were 

 very few. 



The graves of the distant past gave up their dead, and the ossu- 

 aries of our own far West yielded most cogent testimony to the 

 truth. Forms from the eocene and later beds, resurrected by the 

 wand of the anatomist, rising in successive lines behind the wide 

 gaps in the living files, proclaimed that all were of one blood, and 

 showed the genealogy of the contemporaries of man. 



Many were the forms thus connected. Few are those that may 

 be mentioned on this occasion. The horse-like animals, the rhi- 

 noceroses, and tapirs are so unlike, that proof of their derivation 

 from one source might be thought to be impossible. But as we go 

 back into the ages we find equines with lateral digits and hooflets 



*Rev. Baden Powell's Essay on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, etc., 

 P- 455- 



