SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 583 



probable periods of intense heat and cold. Certain it is, however, that we 

 have pointed out some feeble and apparently defenceless aninaals in the 

 Paleeozoic ages which possessed similar complex structures and organisms 

 to those of the later days of the earth's history, and that, whether they 

 survived the catastrophes of the Permian period in some unexplored geo- 

 logical region of its crust, as Professor Cope has suggested in accotinting 

 for the sudden appearance of new forms of animal life in the Tertiary, or 

 whether they were completely extinguished before its close, there is no sat- 

 isfactory fossil evidence that they were evolved one from another. On the 

 contrary, the rocks of that period show the same marked differences in or- 

 ders and species that are seen to exist between similar animals of the 

 present day. The Foraminifera of those remote ages are found in the ooze 

 of the ocean to-day; the cuttle fishes, nautili, king crabs and vertebrate 

 fishes are met with in our seas almost in the identical forms in which the 

 Paleozoic rocks present them to us, and the powers and influences of Evo- 

 lution and Natural Selection seem to have modified them so slightly as to 

 render it doubtful whether, in a single instance, one of these orders presents 

 a higher development than it did at the close of the Permian age, thousands 

 and thousands of years ago. 



The next grand division made by geologists is known as the Mesozoio 

 or middle age of the earth's history. Its earliest period is called the Tri- 

 assic, which, though differing but slightly in general features from the 

 Permian, in which the animal forms of the Palasozoic were seen to disappear^ 

 is characterized by such a remarkable change and activity in the domain of 

 life that, as has been fitly said by an eminent explorer and writer, "the 

 geologist, whose mind is filled with the forms of the Paleozoic period, feels 

 himself a sort of Eip Van Winkle, who has slept a hundred years, and 

 awaked in a new world." Having buried the animals of the past in the 

 depths of the Palaeozoic rocks, it seems wonderful, as we ascend to the suceed- 

 ing Triassic strata, to come sud|d%riy upon the comparatively well preserved 

 remains of gigantic Saurians, spme of which possessed a muscular develop- 

 ment, a complicated tooth structure and a general organization of a far 

 higher type than those of any living reptile ; birds of greater size, of a 

 brain development probably superior to, and blood circulation similar to, 

 those of the present day ; and land lizards of huge size, possessing many of 

 the attributes of the higher vertebrata and some of those of the mammalia. 



If these animals were evolved or developed from j^revious orders or 

 species, where are the connecting links which prove their descent from 

 anything that existed in the Palaeozoic ? None have been found. Huxley 

 in England and Marsh in America themselves admit that "the Trias offers 

 at present the first unquestioned evidence of true reptiles," and can only 

 avoid the dilemma in which they are placed, by seeing in the fragments of 

 fossil anatomy which they are studying, hints of relationship which are to 

 them ^'suve prophecies of future discoveries." But prophecies are not facts. 

 When these discoveries are actually made, as they are certainly liable to be. 



