592 SOME OBJECTIONS TO TEE EVOLUTION THEORY. 



horse is the most perfect demonstrative proof of derivative genesis ever 

 presented. Descent they consider proved, but the fossil jaws are utterly 

 silent as to what the cause of the Evolution may have been, I have studied 

 the country from which these bones came, and am able to make this sug- 

 gestive geological commentary: Between the two successive forms of the 

 horse there was a catastrophe which seriously altered the climate and con- 

 figuration of the whole region in which these animals lived. Huxley and 

 Marsh assert that the bones prove descent. My own work proves that 

 each new modification succeeded a catastrophe. And the almost univer- 

 sality of such coincidences is, to my mind, warrant for the anticipation that 

 not very far in the future it may be seen that the Evolution of environment 

 has been the major cause of the evolution of life ; that a mere Malthusian 

 struggle was not the author and finisher of evolution, but that He who 

 brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter^ 

 bestowed at the same time a power of development by change; arranging 

 that the inter-action of energy and matter, which make up the environipent, 

 should from time to time burst in upon the current of life and sweep it on- 

 ward and upward to even better and higher manifestations. Moments of 

 great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments 

 of creation, when out of plastic organism, something nearer and nobler is 

 called into life." 



Now, let us see how the advocates of Evolution agree among themselves. 

 Mr. Clarence King, who is referred to above as the latest advocate and re- 

 viver of the catastrophic means of accounting for missing links in the 

 chain, thus speaks of Mr. Darwin's theories: "Whatever change takes 

 place by Natural Selection in uniformitarian ages, according to Darwin 

 advances by spontaneous, aimless sporting, and the survival of those varie- 

 ties best adapted to surrounding conditions, and of these conditions the 

 biological relations are by far the most important of all. By that means 

 and that alone, it is asserted, species came into existence, and inferentially, • 

 all the other forms, from first to^last. This is the gosj^el of chance!" Hav- 

 ing thus given his opinion of the Natural Selection theory, he proceeds to 

 give his own view of the continuity of life through and beyond one of his 

 catastrophes in Nature, thus : " When catastrophic change (as for instance 

 from the Palaeozoic to the Mesozoic period) burst in upon the ages of uni- 

 formity and sounded in the ears of every living thing the words 'change 

 or die,' plasticity became the sole principle of salvation. Plasticity, then, 

 is that quality which, in suddenly enforced physical change, is the key to 

 survival and prosperity. And the survival of the plastic, that is, of the 

 rapidly and healthily modifiable, during periods when terrestrial revolution 

 offers to species the rigorous dilemma of prodigious change or certain 

 death, is a widely different principle from the survival of the fittest in a 

 general biological battle during terrestrial uniformity. In one case it is an 

 accommodation between the individual organism and inorganic environment, 

 in which the most yielding and plastic lives. In the other it is a Malthusian 



