54Q THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



men such as the author of the " Vestiges " urge that the geologic evidence, 

 taken as a whole, and in its bearing upon groups and periods, establishes the 

 general fact that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher, . . . that 

 the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird 

 preceded the mammiferous quadruped and that the mammiferous quadruped and 

 the quadrumand preceded man? Assuredly yes! They may and do urge that 

 geology furnishes evidence of such a succession of existences; and the arrange- 

 ment seems at once a very wonderful and very beautiful one. Of that great and 

 imposing procession of which this world has been the scene, the programme 

 has been admirably marshalled. But the order of the arrangement by no 

 means justifies the inference based upon it by the Lamarckian. 



The reason why, according to Miller, it does not, constitutes the 

 fifth objection urged against evolutionism from the side of paleontology; 

 " superposition," as Miller put it, " does not mean parental relation," 

 any more than the presence of gradually accumulated vegetable and 

 animal refuse in a farmer's ditch means that the creatures whose 

 remains lie at the bottom of the ditch begot those whose remains are 

 found higher up. 



The last argument does not call, and never did call, for serious 

 consideration ; it is a begging of the precise question at issue, concealed 

 by a specious but lame analogy. The other four arguments depended, 

 with respect to their logical weight, upon the way in which they were 

 applied. If it were assumed that the burden of offering specific proofs 

 rested upon the transformationist, and that the paleontological evidence 

 was put forward by him as a proof, the objections of the orthodox geol- 

 ogists were perfectly sound: the paleontological evidence was not clear 

 nor complete — though it assuredly pointed toward the probability of the 

 hypothesis. If, again, transformism were regarded as an hypothesis 

 which implied the existence of certain geologic facts, then, also, the 

 objections enumerated were pertinent — with one all-important and 

 extremely obvious qualification : the implied facts in stratigraphic geol- 

 ogy had not been verified — so far as inquiry into a record that will 

 always and necessarily remain fragmentary had then extended. If, 

 lastly, the objections were advanced as a positive disproof of the trans- 

 formation of species, they were entirely incompetent, by reason of the 

 necessity of adding the qualification last mentioned. The record being 

 notoriously incomplete, it was impossible to infer from mere breaches of 

 continuity, and from an occasional failure in the general parallelism of 

 geological antiquity with simplicity of organic type, that the order of 

 appearance of species had not in fact been progressive, and the result 

 of gradual modification through natural descent. The difficulties raised 

 by the conservative paleontologists logically justified, at the utmost, 

 only a Scotch verdict of " not proven " — so far as this part of the 

 testimony is concerned. 



This continued to be the logical situation in 1859 and for a number 

 of years thereafter. Darwin wrote to Quatrefages: 



