THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



in the animal and the plant kingdom, accompanied by 

 a slow and steady progress in organization. This is 

 directly and positively taught by paleontology ; its crea- 

 tion-medals, the fossils, are unequivocal and irrefutable 

 witnesses to this phylogenetic advance. I have dealt 

 with the subject in my History of Creation, and at the 

 same time shown that both the progressive improvement 

 and the increasing variety of the species can be explained 

 mechanically as necessary consequences of selection. 

 There was no need of a conscious Creator or a tran- 

 scendental purposiveness to effect this. Scientific and 

 thorough proof of this will be found in the three volumes 

 of my Systematic Phytogeny (1894). I need only refer 

 briefly to the two conspicuous examples we have in the 

 stem-history of the tissue-plants and that of the verte- 

 brates. Of the metaphyta the ferns are the chief groups 

 in the Paleozoic, the gymnosperms in the Mesozoic, and 

 the angiosperms in the Cenozoic age. Of the vertebrates 

 only fishes are found in the Silurian age, dipneusta only 

 begin in the Devonian, and the first mammals are in the 

 Triassic. 



A number of false teleological conclusions have been 

 drawn from these facts of progressive modification of 

 forms, as they are given in paleontology. The latest and 

 most developed form of each stem was taken to be the 

 preconceived aim of the series, and its imperfect pre- 

 decessors were conceived as preparatory stages to the 

 attainment of this aim. It was like the conduct of 

 many historians, who, when a particular race or state 

 has reached a high rank in civilization as a result of its 

 natural endowments and favorable conditions of devel- 

 opment, hail it as a "chosen people," and regard its 

 imperfect earlier condition as a deliberately conceived 

 preparatory stage. In point of fact, these evolutionary 

 stages were bound to proceed according as the internal 

 structure (given by heredity) and the outer conditions 



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