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That the apparently blind groping and experimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed by palaeontology the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, the hit-and-miss method should have finally resulted in this supreme animal, man, puts our scientific faith to the test. In the light of evolution how the halo with which we have surrounded our origin vanishes!

What then does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of palaeontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose that modification to have taken place by a necessary progress from more to less embryonic forms, or from more to less generalised types, within the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous rocks?

On the other hand, all the chief laws of palaeontology plainly proclaim, as it seems to me, that species have been produced by ordinary generation: old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, produced by the laws of variation still acting round us, and preserved by Natural Selection. Present distribution cannot be accounted for by differences in physical conditions.

These assuredly are great and solid gains. But this is not all. Allied with geology, palaeontology has established two laws of inestimable importance: the first, that one and the same area of the earth's surface has been successively occupied by very different kinds of living beings; the second, that the order of succession established in one locality holds good, approximately, in all.

We know already that extinct animals exist all over the world: heaped together under the snows of Siberia, lying thick beneath the Indian soil, found wherever English settlers till the ground or work the mines of Australia, figured in the old Encyclopaedias of China, where the Chinese philosophers have drawn them with the accuracy of their nation, built into the most beautiful temples of classic lands, for even the stones of the Parthenon are full of the fragments of these old fossils, and if any chance had directed the attention of Aristotle towards them, the science of Palaeontology would not have waited for its founder till Cuvier was born, in short, in every corner of the earth where the investigations of civilized men have penetrated, from the Arctic to Patagonia and the Cape of Good Hope, these relics tell us of successive populations lying far behind our own, and belonging to distinct periods of the world's history.

If there is any cause competent to produce a fossil stem, or shell, or bone, except a living being, then palaeontology has no foundation; if the stratification of the rocks is not the effect of such causes as at present produce stratification, we have no means of judging of the duration of past time, or of the order in which the forms of life have succeeded one another.

So far as they are guided by palaeontology, they arrive at this result by an independent course of reasoning; but they have been conducted partly to the same goal as the ancients by ethnological considerations common to both, or by reflecting in what darkness the infancy of every nation is enveloped and that true history and chronology are the creation, as it were, of yesterday.

Then, as these things were gradually added to science from the seventeenth century onwards, and the record of the rocks gave the confirmation of palaeontology, the whole realm of living nature was gradually unfolded before us, every form connected both in function and in history with every other, every organ fulfilling a necessary part, either now or in the past, and growing and changing to gain a more perfect accord with its environment.

But it may be said that the method of Zadig, which is simple reasoning from analogy, does not account for the most striking feats of modern palaeontology the reconstruction of entire animals from a tooth or perhaps a fragment of a bone; and it may be justly urged that Cuvier, the great master of this kind of investigation, gave a very different account of the process which yielded such remarkable results.

And it is a curious circumstance that the most important event in the history of palaeontology which immediately succeeded William Smith's generalisation was a discovery which, could it have been rightly appreciated at the time, would have gone far towards suggesting the answer, which was in fact delayed for more than half a century.