538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ontology receive a meaning — upon any other hypothesis I am unable to see, in 

 the slightest degree, what knowledge or signification we are to draw from them. 

 Again, note . . . the singular likeness which obtains between the successive 

 faunae and flora, whose remains are preserved in the rocks; you never find any 

 great and enormous difference between them, unless you have reason to believe 

 that there has also been a great lapse of time or a great change of conditions. 



Just so did Chambers argue in his " Explanations," 1846 : 



Fifty years ago science possessed no facts regarding the origin of organic 

 creatures upon earth. . . . Within that time, by researches in the crust of the 

 earth, we have obtained a bold outline of the history of the globe. ... It is 

 shown on powerful evidence that during this time strata of various thicknesses 

 were deposited in seas; . . . volcanic agency broke up the strata, etc. . . . The 

 remains and traces of plants and animals found in the succession of strata 

 show that while these operations were going on the earth gradually became 

 the theatre of organic being, simple forms appearing first and more complicated 

 afterwards. . . . This is a wonderful revelation to have come upon the men of 

 our time, and one which the philosophers of the age of Newton could never 

 have expected to be vouchsafed. The great fact established by it is that the 

 organic creation, as we now see it, was not placed upon the earth at once: — it 

 observed a progress. 26 . . . There is also the fact of an ascertained historical 

 progress of plants and animals in the order of their organization. ... In an 

 arbitrary system we had surely no reason to expect mammals after reptiles; yet 

 in this order they came." 



Thus the general fact of the gradual appearance of higher types in 

 the course of geological time, and the existence of a broad parallelism 

 between antiquity of strata and relative simplicity of the contained 

 organic forms, was by this time thoroughly established and universally 

 familiar. True it is, however, that the evidence from paleontology, 

 when more minutely scrutinized, proved to be by no means so favorable 

 to the development hypothesis. This was so far the case that the ortho- 

 dox geologists were able, with some real plausibility, to turn this weapon 

 against the evolutionists. One of the only two really serious reasons 

 that could be advanced after 1840 for rejecting the hypothesis lay in 

 the observation that the facts of stratigraphic geology, as then known, 

 failed to exhibit, with any consistency, fulness or precision, the se- 

 quences that the hypothesis required. The principal fighting, between 

 the time of the " Vestiges " and that of the " Origin," took place around 

 this issue ; and the battle-ground was well chosen for the conservatives. 

 For the weakest side of the theory of development then was its paleon- 

 tological side. But this continued to be its weakest side in the 1860's ; 

 and it is a side not wholly without weak points even at the present day, 

 especially when to the theory of development is added the theory of 

 natural selection. 



The chief objections raised by the paleontologists were five in num- 

 ber. There was, first, the general difficulty about the " missing links " 

 in the chain of past organisms. Secondly, there was the fact of the 



M Op. tit., p. 21. 

 "Op. tit., p. 106. 



