CHAPTER IV. 



Since we have heard the verdict of zoologists and 

 botanists concerning Darwinism, it is but right that we 

 should now listen to a palaeontologist, a representative of 

 the science, which investigates the petrified records of the 

 earth's surface, and strives to collect information regard- 

 ing the world of life during remote, by-gone ages of the 

 earth. It is evident to every one that the verdict of this 

 science must be of very specal importance in passing on the 

 question of the development of living organisms. Darwin 

 himself recognized this at the outset. He and his follow- 

 ers, however, soon perceived that, while the revelations of 

 palaeontology were on the whole favorable to the doctrine 

 of Descent, in so far as they proved the gradual change 

 of organization, in consecutive strata, from the simple to 

 more complex forms, palaeontology revealed noth- 

 ing that would sustain the Darwinian theory as to 

 the method of that development. As soon as the 

 Darwinians, and first of all Darwin himself, per- 

 ceived this, they at once brought forward a very 

 cheap subterfuge. Since Darwinism postulates a very 

 gradual, uninterrupted development of living organ- 

 isms, there must have been an immense number of 

 transition-forms between any two animal or plant species 

 which to-day, although otherwise related, are separated by 



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