7 
stances'?— for if we acknowledge the development of progress, surely 
we must acknowledge that of retrogression also. I think not ! and 
if you will allow me, I will quote the opinion of the late Dr. Hugh 
Falconer, a competent judge on the subject, you will probably 
consider. In an essay containing general observations on the 
living and extinct species of elephants, he thus expresses himself : — 
After stating that he finds the characters derived from the molar 
teeth, and from the organs of locomotion in the Mammoth, to show 
that the species retained its specific character unchanged from first 
to last, “ If wo cast a glance back on the long vista of physical 
changes which our planet has undergone since the Neozoic epoch, 
we can nowhere detect signs of a revolution more sudden and pro- 
nounced, or more important in its results, than the intercalation 
and subsequent disappearance of the Glacial period. Yet the 
‘ Dicyclotherian ’ Mammoth lived before it, and passed through the 
ordeal of all the hard extremities which it involved, bearing his 
organs of locomotion and digestion all but unchanged.” And again, 
after acknowledging that he does not think that the Mammoth 
made its appearance suddenly after the type in which its fossil 
remains are presented to us, but that it is in some shape the modi- 
fied descendant of earlier progenitors, he says, “ Another reflection 
is equally strong in my mind, that the means which have been 
adduced to explain the origin of species by ‘ Natural Selection,’ or 
a process of variation from external influences, are inadequate to 
account for the phenomena. The law of Phyllotaxis, which 
governs the evolution of leaves around the axis of a plant, is nearly 
as constant in its manifestation as any of the physical laws con- 
nected with the material ■world ; each instance, however different 
from another, can be shown to be a term of some series of continued 
fractions. When this is coupled with the geometrical law govern- 
ing the evolution of form so manifest in some departments of the 
animal kingdom, e.<j. the spiral shells of the mollusca, it is difficult 
to believe that there is not in nature a deeper seated and innate 
principle, to the operation of which * natural selection ’ is merely 
an adjunct.” 
But if the evidence of persistence in the character of a species, 
