Produce us your cretacean mastodon, or your giraffe, in the Old Red Sandstone, and we will believe that they then existed, but this you cannot do, and therefore we do not believe your theory.

In the mean time it will be observed that negative evidence is admitted in the theory when wanted, and repudiated when it is found to be inconvenient.

The conclusion then is this:

All the great creatures, of which we have been speaking, first make their appearance in the first Tertiary formation.

They do not appear in the antecedent or Secondary formation, nor in any other geological epoch, though the other strata contain abundant fossils of the organic beings which existed during their formation, and which are considered peculiar to them.

The animals that existed in the Secondary formation are not found in the Tertiary, from whence it is concluded that they did not exist in the Tertiary.

The animals that existed in the Tertiary formation are not found in the Secondary,* from whence it is also concluded that they did not exist in the Secondary.

* Sir C. Lyell observes: 'It seems impossible to account for our not having yet found any bones of fish in the Silurian rocks, except by supposing that they were not yet in being, or that they occupied only a limited area.'-Principles of Geology, 10th edition, p. 145, 1866.

Here the negative evidence is admitted as full proof of an important fact in paleontology-we apply this principle in arguing on the Tertiary formation. Nevertheless, in his Antiquity of Man, Sir C. Lyell protests against the negative evidence, just as Mr Darwin does; and thus does he make the Silurian rocks echo to his master's voice. 'It would be a waste of time to speculate on the number of original monads or germs from which all plants and animals were subsequently evolved; moreover as the oldest fossiliferous strata known to us (the Silurian), may be the last of a long series of autecedent formations, which once contained organic beings' (p. 470).

The Tertiary formation then is the era of the first appearance of the animals in question; they began to exist in that epoch, and not sooner.

This is sufficient; all the rest must follow as an inevitable corollary.

The evidence of geology entirely confutes Mr Darwin's Theory of the Transmutation of Species.

CHAPTER XII.

LYELL'S CONFUTATION OF TRANSMUTATION.

THE reader will already have perceived that Sir Charles Lyell entered the lists as an opponent of Transmutation many years ago. This appears in all the earlier editions of the Principles of Geology; ours is the third, of the year 1834. It is from this edition that extracts will be given of his confutation of Lamarck, and it will soon be perceived that every point in that confutation is direct against Mr Darwin, and we may add against Sir C. Lyell himself also. Subsequent to the publication of Mr Darwin's Origin of Species, Sir C. Lyell went over to the opinions which he had so ably confuted; and in his publication on "The Antiquity of Man' has advocated the dogma of Transmutation, even in its most extravagant form. That volume was published in the year 1861.

In the third edition of the Principles of Geology, the learned author has no scruple in expressing himself as a believer in a Creator, he speaks of the Divine Author of all things, and considers the phenomena of Nature as his work. Thirty years ago this was not unusual in the language of scientific writers, but now the fashion is changed, and in the School of Transmutation it would be inappropriate and misplaced. Mr Darwin has candidly told us that Natural

Selection, if it be a true principle, will banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification of their structure' (101). Transmutation is in fact the antitheos of their system; they that believe in Natural Selection, logically cease to believe in a Creator.

In the third edition, already referred to, Sir C. Lyell says: 'We must suppose that when the author of Nature creates an animal or plant, all the possible circumstances in which its descendants are destined to live are foreseen, and that an organization is conferred upon it which will enable the species to perpetuate itself, and survive under all the varying circumstances to which it must be inevitably exposed' (ii. 351). Sentiments such as these were in harmony with the opinions which the learned writer entertained at that time,-we proceed now to lay some of those opinions before the reader.

Lamarck's statements are first given: Every considerable alteration in the local circumstances in which each race of animals exists, causes a change in their wants, and these new wants excite them to new actions and habits. These actions require the more frequent employment of some parts before but slightly exercised, and then greater development follows as a consequence of their more frequent use. Other organs no longer in use are impoverished and diminished in size, nay, are sometimes annihilated, while in their place new parts are insensibly produced for the discharge of new functions.' This is Lamarck's doctrine, and on this Lyell thus comments: I must observe

* In other passages similar language is used, as for instance: 'From the above considerations, it appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed, at the time of its creation, with the attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished (ii. 403).

that no positive fact is cited to exemplify the substitution of some entirely new sense, faculty, or organ, in the room of some other suppressed as useless. All the instances adduced go only to prove that the dimensions and strength of members, and the perfection of certain attributes, may, in a long succession of generations, be lessened and enfeebled by disuse, or on the contrary be matured and augmented by active exertion; just as we know that the power of the scent is feeble in the greyhound, while its swiftness of pace and its acuteness of sight are remarkable; that the harrier and staghound, on the contrary, are comparatively slow in their movements, but excel in the sense of smelling. . . . It is evident that, if some well-authenticated facts could have been adduced to establish one complete step in the process of transformation, such as the appearance, in individuals descending from a common stock, of a sense or organ entirely new, and a complete disappearance of some other enjoyed by their progenitors, time alone might then be supposed sufficient to bring about any amount of metamorphosis.

"The gratuitous assumption, therefore, of a point so vital in the Theory of Transmutation, was unpardonable on the part of its advocate' (ii. 332).

Lamarck's picture of the supposed change of animals on the principle of appetence is then introduced: "The camelopard was not at first gifted with a long and flexible neck, but when reduced by want, made great efforts to reach the leaves of the tree, and so by degrees its neck became lengthened,' &c. On this his critic remarks: But if the soundness of all these arguments and inferences be admitted, we are next to inquire, what were the original types of form, organization, and instinct, from which the