Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/406

 species), which are named and described in this monograph, and between which, as the authors show, so many connecting links, clearly illustrating the derivation of the newer from the older types, have been detected. On the minds of those who carefully examine the admirably engraved figures given in the plates accompanying this valuable memoir, or still better, the very large series of specimens from among which the subjects of these figures are selected, and which are now in the museum of the Reichsanstalt of Vienna, but little doubt will, we suspect, remain that the authors have fully made out their case, and have demonstrated that, beyond all controversy, the series with highly complicated ornamentation were variously derived by descent—the lines of which are in most cases perfectly clear and obvious—from the simple and unornamented Vivipara achatinoides of the Congerien-Schichten (the lower division of the series of strata). It is interesting to notice that a large portion of these unquestionably derived forms depart so widely from the type of the genus Vivipara, that they have been separated on so high an authority as that of Sandberger, as a new genus, under the name of Tulotoma. And hence we are led to the conclusion that a vast number of forms, certainly exhibiting specific distinctions, and according to some naturalists, differences even entitled to be regarded of generic value, have all a common ancestry."

It is, as Professor Judd remarks, owing to the exceptionally favourable circumstances of a long-continued and unbroken series of deposits being formed under physical conditions either identical or very slowly changing, that we owe so complete a record of the process of organic change. Usually, some disturbing elements, such as a sudden change of physical conditions, or the immigration of new sets of forms from other areas and the consequent retreat or partial extinction of the older fauna, interferes with the continuity of organic development, and produces those puzzling discordances so generally met with in geological formations of marine origin. While a case of the kind now described affords evidence of the origin of species complete and conclusive, though on a necessarily very limited scale, the very rarity of the conditions which are essential to such completeness serves to explain why it is that in most cases the direct evidence of evolution is not to be obtained.