134 The Queensland Naturalist. Vol. L 
palseontology a fragment of the rainbow band one gets 
in gazing on the moon through a prism. 
30. — Now, so far as I know, no one has sufficiently 
appreciated this particular (and I believe important), yet 
patent fact in the palaeontological record. Its supreme 
importance will appear further on, 
31. — Darwin’s magnificent expositions were the 
immediate cause of the birth of two great concepts. 
Ontology, or the theory that the individual, in its progress 
from the impregnated ovum to the adult, recapitulated 
more or less accurately its evolutionary history. And 
Pliylogeny. which is the attempt to re-build the ancestral 
tree by the study of fossil forms. If Darwin had incited 
nothing more than this he would still stand pre-eminent 
in biological history. 
32. — Singularly, both phylogeny and ontology have 
failed to fulfill the promise of their advertised programme.. 
Ontogenists, like the delightful Kitchen Parker, have to 
say, “T seemed to myself to have been endeavouring to 
decipher a palimpsest, and one not erased and written 
upon again just once, but five or six times over.” He 
tried in vain to fit natural selection into fact. 
33. — Phylogenists in like manner have had to say that 
‘‘however other folk may find it fit with their studies, it 
does not tally with my own particular branch of science.” 
But this we will refer to further on. Ontology and 
phylogeny are both (most likely) true — they only fail 
when they aim at adapting facts to fictions. 
34. — To close this section. I have tried to show that 
TIME, nay almost EXT.ERNITY, is the bank upon which 
a particular school of evolutionists have to draw, and that, 
quite apart from the physical evidence of the age of the- 
earth, they must account for hundreds of thousands, nay,, 
millions, of years as elapsing between two absolutely iden- 
tical layers of mud a hundredth of an inch thick. 
35. — It is absurd to argue that specific change took 
place sofnewhere else. Every vertical foot of every geo- 
logical stratum in every part of the world tells the same 
story of (apparently) rapid change. Nowhere have these 
infinitesimal varieties put in an appearance. 
30. — When Darwin first cleared the mists away and 
made evolution a possibility, nay even a fact for us, he was 
justified in apj^ealing to the imperfection of the geological 
record. Much of Europe was unknown. America had 
only been touched. Asia had not revealed any of her 
hid treasure, Africa was in truth the dark continent, 
and Australia hardly counted at all. 
Much of this is now altered. The gaps, geographically, 
have been largely filled in, and if so, then we are surely 
