bians, and these latter not until the Carboniferous, their highest members appearing only in the TERTIARY era? Why should the chelonian reptiles make their appearance before the saurian, and both these before birds? How is it that certain hoofed quadrupeds should have preceded others, in a line ranging from the tapir-like Palæotheria of Europe, through many intermediate forms structurally prophetic of the horse, which does not appear, however, until all of them have become extinct? What are we to think of the remarkable chain of proboscidians (Deinocerata), with characters partly elephantine and partly ruminant, existing prior to true elephants and stags-a host of large herbivorous creatures, which had died out before the rhinoceros or hippopotamus had come upon the scene? We are, indeed, met at every step by an apparent continuity, which, if it be not substantially real, is a most extraordinary delusion.

At the same time, it cannot be contended that the doctrine of evolution is all-sufficient. As a working hypothesis, it enables the palæontologist to classify and compare his facts, and to give them a meaning, intelligible within the limits of our knowledge at least. It may at some future time be abandoned, as have many successive astronomical theories, doing in the mean time good service by concentrating thought upon well-defined points. The zoologist, dealing with living forms, has, perhaps, surer ground for confidence than the palæontologist, groping among the fragments of shattered strata ; but he never can complete his genealogy without help

from the latter. He cannot with confidence pronounce that the apteryx of New Zealand was a separate creation for those islands, but finds himself thrown back upon the past, when large tracts of land were occupied by groups of which this is a mere remnant. He knows that the apteryx is the only living representative of its gigantic congeners, the moas, in New Zealand; but he does not know how much submerged land, which bore the same forms, may lie hidden beneath the Southern Ocean; while in Asia, Africa, and America, birds, possessing great similarity of structure, and especially the characteristic shield-like breast-bone, still abound. The evolutionist tells us that these forms, though they appear to us completely isolated, have remained over, in the areas they now occupy, from a far larger group; and, if we could strip the ocean from the earth, we should probably find them continued into long since subsided lands. Their isolation, then, is apparent only; and the whole field of geology supports his conclusion. During the great "reptile age," the distribution of land and water must have been such that, had a zoologist been called upon to make a list of existing species, he would have had as much reason as now to point to seemingly distinct creations, or rather, as the evolutionist views the question, to the occupation, by singular creatures, of isolated areas geographically distant, though, not so long previously, united. When living marsupials first became known, they astonished and perplexed naturalists beyond measure. Separated by the whole expanse of

as

the Pacific Ocean, they might indeed have been regarded distinct creations for America and Australasia respectively; but the fact of their existence on opposite sides of the globe, and in no intermediate area, was itself a circumstance pointing to once conterminous geographical and zoological boundaries. By-and-by the geologists found them as fossils in the Oolite of Europe, proving them to be nothing specially extraordinary. They have disappeared from Europe, and remain only in America and Australasia. Distinct as are the Arctic types of mammals, some at least of them, as the reindeer and lemming, have had a range amounting to thirty degrees of latitude southwards of their present habitat; yet, if we judge by their now restricted limits, they might have come suddenly into existence and have been wholly confined to the Arctic regions. Asia and Africa, again, alone possess, in our day, true elephants; but we have only to strip off the surface of almost contemporary accumulations, to find closely related species occupying the most prominent position among. the herbivora of Northern Europe and America, to the very verge of the Arctic circle.

So long as the zoologist had before him a small body of facts, admittedly remarkable in themselves and unconnected with the past history of the globe, he had no alternative but to explain them by a law of creation operating suddenly for the production of new and vastly advanced forms. He has now abandoned this ground, because the paleontologist has shown him organisms

advancing by successive steps towards the isolated beings which had excited his astonishment, and led him to an erroneous conclusion.

It should scarcely be a question with us how far our sense of the Creative power is affected by the consideration of this subject. If it be most true that all living beings are the result of a continuous, instead of sudden impulse of creation, then it is undoubtedly most noble, and the human mind must eventually recognize the fitness of truth in whatsoever guise it may present itself. Dr. Charles Darwin, every page of whose works is instinct with an earnest spirit of reverence for Creative power, concludes "The Origin of Species" in these eloquent words

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings, not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken,

and that no cataclysm has desolated the world. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved."