6 WATSON : RELATION OF MADEIRAN MOLLUSCA TO OTHERS. 



Between these one hundred and thirty-three lines there is 

 no convergence — the lines are parallel. Traced back there is 

 no imaginary centre on which they can be said to bear. In 

 the earliest period no more than in the latest is there intensifi- 

 cation of conformity to that Mediterranean type which stamps 

 them. Between themselves there is no swaying of the lines to 

 and fro, they do not bifurcate, they do not pass over from one 

 form into another, they give off no sports maturing into distinct 

 species. The fifty-seven species which have come in have 

 simply come in from no outside locality, and they have come 

 without warning, and without trace of descent. If in their 

 embryos there were any of those suggestions of collateral 

 relationship of which so much is often made, the lapse of five 

 hundred years has failed to give to these any practical effect. The 

 one feature which the species present throughout the whole 

 record is uncompromising unalterable individuality. 



Here then is a multitude of land shells absolutely 

 peculiar to this little sea-girt speck of earth's surface : from 

 nowhere else have they come. What does their record 

 tell ? Does their presence imply so many distinct creative 

 acts ? That was the answer which was accepted in past 

 days, but it has been discarded and rightly discarded 

 because it was equivocal ; it seemed to say one thing but it 

 really conveyed two. To many people it simply meant ' We 

 don't know how these species came,' but if that is all we mean 

 it would be better simply to say so. If on the other hand, it 

 meant to assert that without the intervention of any secondary 

 causes these species have been called into being by the im- 

 mediate and reiterated intervention of creative power, then that 

 assertion was a jumping to a conclusion instead of a careful 

 study of the evidence. That the worlds were framed by the 

 Word of God is one thing, but it is a very different thing indeed 

 to say there has been a whole succession of creative acts 

 reiterated again and again. Is that so? That is the very 

 question to which we are trying to find an answer — a true 



J.C., vii., Jan., iSgz 



