142 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



With respect to these fossil forms, it is fundamentally indifferent 

 whether a very short, or a somewhat longer portion of any branch 

 be honored by a special name, and looked upon as a species. The 

 prickly Ammonites, classified under the name Arraata, are so in- 

 trinsically connected, that it becomes an impossibility to separate 

 sharply, the accepted species from one another. The same obser- 

 vation applies also to the group of which the manifold forms are 

 distinguished by their ribbed shells, and termed Planulata. 



This is sufficient to show why modern inquiry "sets aside the 

 phantom of 'species,' and to judge what series of observations are 

 opposed to the assertion, that in no single case has evidence been 

 given of the transition of one species into another." " The fact 

 is," says Huxley, " that if the objections which are raised to the 

 general doctrine of evolution were not theological objections, their 

 utter childishness would be manifest even to the most childlike 

 of believers,' " 



" Scarcely a single fact," says that most careful observer Neu- 

 mayr, " speaks more decisively in favor of the correctness of the 

 theory o£ descent, than the existence of series of forms in the man- 

 ner in which they have already been proved in many cases, and 

 will, no doubt, be now found more frequently, since attention has 

 been called to this point.' " 



But it is not only among the lower animals that these transition 

 forms have been found. Even among vertebrates, and what is the 

 more important, between those classes, orders and families, which 

 at present are separated very widely from one another, these con- 

 necting links multiply almost daily, bearing in mind, of course, 

 the great imperfection of the geological record. 



" The class of birds and reptiles as now living," says Prof. 

 Marsh, of Yale College, to whom palaeontology owes so many im- 

 portant discoveries, " are separated by a gulf so profound, that a 

 few years since it was cited by the opponents of evolution as the 

 most important break in the animal series, and one which that 

 doctrine could not bridge over. Since then, as Huxley has clearly 

 shown, this gap has been virtually filled by the discovery of bird- 

 like reptiles and reptilian birds.' " 



In 1860, shortly after the appearance of Darwin's "Origin of 



