448 Scientific Intelligence. 
The eriticisms from which, eile it is least able to escape are those 
which call for lacking intermediate forms between tr ibes, families, and 
other great groups, or for some evidence that they ever existed. Here 
Prof. Phillips as a geologist feels his bo ig and urges his point more 
aptly than some other critics have 
“The explanation offered in the ‘Aappetied of Mr. Darwin is, that the 
groups of life which appear to be and really are distinct, in the Cambro- 
Silurian rocks are not aboriginal forms, but derived from progenitors of far 
earlier date, ge to few types or - one, the original form, and the 
transition forms being known to us. w they are not unknown to us by 
any impossibility of being preserved, ba the strata of the Cambro-Silurian 
series are of a kind in which organic remains of great delicacy are often 
preserved, and indeed such are preserved in these very strata; and by the 
hypothesis the life-structures which are lost must have only gradually dif- 
red in their nature from those which are preserved. It follows, therefore, 
that the earlier-living progenitors of the Cambro-Silurian or not only 
lived long before, but must have lived somewhere else. But as in all the 
_ known examples of this series of strata, or ane found, we ate every- 
where a of the same general type, and nowhere the traces of the 
bic progenitors, = is clear that everywhere we are required by the hy- 
thesis to look somewhere else ;—which may fairly be in ted : 
— 
How . it conceivable that the second stage should be Sraryarhere 
e first nowhere?” (p. 214, as} 
So, also, of what follo ows : 
remove ‘natural selection’ from the large synonomy of ‘chance’ except 
by giving to one of the variable conditions of which it is the sum, direc- 
tion, definite value, or effect. Is it not the one acknowledged possession 
of every species, au inherent tendency to ee its like? Would not 
the effect of this one constant among any number of variables without 
= 
uslarations, fixes a « constant” — would a tend “to pre- 
serve the characters of ‘the * variety’ forever 
“ And,” 
,’ continues our author, hit bt selection’ were regarded 
giving direction to these va riables, i in combination with that constant i 
deney, what would be the “final result but that which has always been 
recognized, viz: a species varying within limits which are to be sought 
out by experience. But finally, if natural selection be thus gifted with 
the power tof continually acting for the good of its subject, encouraging 
it, or rather Ree ra it to continual advancement,—how is this beneti- 
aient personification to be separated from an ever-watchful providence,— 
a 
