544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



circumstances, it was open to the paleontologist to multiply species 

 almost ad libitum; if he had adopted a theory which required that no 

 species found in one stratum should be found in another, it was easy to 

 make the most of slight variations of form. Differentiations of species 

 thus made, however, were essentially subjective; all that could con- 

 ceivably have been proven objectively was that no form remained the 

 same through successive geological periods. Yet even of this no proof 

 was forthcoming ; the geologic record was not the sort of document that 

 could furnish proof for a universal negative. It furnished, in fact, evi- 

 dence on the other side. Even Cuvier's eulogist had been obliged 

 (1841) to limit the generalization by adding "at least among mam- 

 mals and reptiles " — and then to make further exception of two orders 

 of mammals. And Hitchcock in his " The Eeligion of Geology " 

 (1852), while exaggerating the discontinuity of then known types, 

 could say no more than that, " of the thirty thousand species of ani- 

 mals and plants found in the rocks, very few living species can be de- 

 tected." But a few were as good as a multitude as witnesses to the fact 

 that there had been no such complete, simultaneous extinctions of 

 faunas, and radical alterations of terrestrial conditions, as the Cuvier- 

 ian theory supposed. 37 And we find Chambers, in 1844, citing specific 

 examples of persistency, as Huxley was to do fifteen years later. 



There is a badger of the Miocene which can not be distinguished from the 

 badger of the present day. Our existing Meles taxus is therefore acknowledged 

 by Mr. Owen to be " the oldest known species of mammal on the face of the 

 earth." It is in like manner impossible to discover any difference between the 

 existing wild cat and that which lived in the bone caves with the hyaena, 

 rhinoceros and tiger of the ante-drift era, all of which are said to be extinct 

 species. . . . There is a persistency of certain shells since the beginning of the 

 tertiaries. . . . Several shells of the secondary formation straggling into the 

 tertiaries are not less conclusive, in rigid reasoning, that all the tertiary species 

 were descended from the secondary, though the wide unrepresented interval 

 at that point allowed a greater transition of forms. In short, the whole of 

 the divisions constructed by geologists upon the supposition of extensive intro- 

 ductions of totally new vehicles of life must give way before the application of 

 this rule, and it must be seen that what they call new species are but variations 

 of the old. 38 



7. The Argument from the Recapitulation Theory. — In charging 

 Chambers with prematurity in his acceptance of evolutionism, Pro- 

 fessor Le Conte urged that " the foundation, the only solid foundation, 

 of a true theory of evolution " is to be had solely in " the method of 



37 It was, indeed, possible to restate the special creation theory so as to avoid 

 this difficulty; extinctions and fresh productions of species, one at a time, might 

 be supposed to have taken place continuously, without any general or widespread 

 " revolutions of the globe." Such a conception was put forward by Bronn in 

 1857. But when thus amended the theory was pretty manifestly in a state of 

 hopeless overstrain. It now made miraculous interpositions a matter of, so to 

 say, almost daily occurrence in the geologic history. 



88 " Explanations," 1846, p. 108 f. 



