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It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations en masse; but catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted on all hands that the seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.
The six ages, with their six special creations, could no longer be maintained, when it was discovered that species, slowly emerged in one age, reached a culmination in a second, and gradually died out in a third: this overlapping from age to age would not only have demanded creations, but re-creations also.
It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations en masse; but catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted, on all hands, that the seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.
For, if there have been no periodical general physical catastrophes, what brought about the assumed general extinctions and re-creations of life which are the corresponding biological catastrophes? And, if no such interruptions of the ordinary course of nature have taken place in the organic, any more than in the inorganic, world, what alternative is there to the admission of evolution?
It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations 'en masse'; but catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted on all hands that the seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.
'The gentles were at their games, and the soul of new ages was beginning its re-creations. For this is but the beginning of that 'Armada' that this Don Armado who fights with sword and pen, in ambush and in the open field will sweep his old enemy from the seas with yet. O like a book of sports thou'lt read me o'er, But there's more in me than thou'lt understand.
The "Blessed Damozel" herself, who "leaned out From the gold Bar of Heaven," is a figure from the Paradiso, divested of the excessive abstraction of that part of Dante, and clothed partly in the gayer colours and more fleshly personality of English and French mediævalism, partly in a mystical halo which is peculiar to these nineteenth century re-creations of mediæval thought and feeling.
From a bit of strata here, and a bit there, he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geologic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct animals from fragments of their bones; and the same interpretative power of the imagination is called into play in both cases, only the palaeontologist has a much narrower field to work in, and the background of his re-creations must be supplied by the geologist.
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