LIFE PROGRESSIVE. 
TO one can doubt that the earth’s crust, so far as it has 
been deciphered by man, presents us with a record, 
imperfect though it be, of the past. Whether, however, the 
known and admitted imperfections of its records, geological 
and paleontological, are sufficiently trustworthy to account 
satisfactorily for the lack of direct evidence recognizable in 
some modern hypotheses, may be a matter of individual 
opinion, but there can be little doubt that they are sufficiently 
extensive to throw the balance of evidence decisively in 
favor of some theory of continuity, as opposed to any 
theory of intermittent and occasional action, which some 
writers have strenuously and intelligently advocated. No 
marks of mighty and general convulsions of nature exist, 
as the seeming breaks which divide the grand series of 
stratified rocks into numerous isolated formations would 
indicate. They are simply indications of the imperfection 
of our knowledge. Science will never, in all probability, 
point to a complete series of deposits, or to a complete 
succession of life, which shall link one geological period to 
another. But that such deposits and such an unbroken 
succession must have existed at one time we may well feel 
sure, and stand ready to believe that nowhere in the long 
series of fossiliferous rocks has there been a total break, but 
that there has inevitably been a complete continuity of life, 
as well as a more or less complete continuity of sedimenta- 
tion from the Laurentian period to the present day. One 
generation, speaking figuratively, hands on the lamp of life 
to the next, and each system of rocks is the direct offspring 
