Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/186

174 they are found are sedimentary deposits; and each of these propositions is founded upon the same axiom that like effects imply like causes. If there is any cause competent to produce a fossil stem, or shell, or bone, except a living being, then paleontology 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. But, if these two propositions are granted, there is no escape, as it appears to me, from three very important conclusions. The first is, that living matter has existed upon the earth for a vast length of time, certainly for millions of years. The second is that, during this lapse of time, the forms of living matter have undergone repeated changes, the effect of which has been that the animal and vegetable population at any period of the earth's history contains some species which did not exist at some antecedent period, and others which ceased to exist at some subsequent period. The third is that, in the case of many groups of mammals and some of reptiles, in which one type can be followed through a considerable extent of geological time, the series of different forms by which the type is represented at successive intervals of this time is exactly such as it would be if they had been produced by the gradual modification of the earliest form of the series. These are facts of the history of the earth guaranteed by as good evidence as any facts in civil history.

Hitherto I have kept carefully clear of all the hypotheses to which men have at various times endeavored to fit the facts of paleontology, or by which they have endeavored to connect as many of these facts as they happened to be acquainted with. I do not think it would be a profitable employment of our time to discuss conceptions which doubtless have had their justification and even their use, but which are now obviously incompatible with the well-ascertained truths of paleontology. At present these truths leave room for only two hypotheses. The first is that, in the course of the history of the earth, innumerable species of animals and plants have come into existence, independently of one another, innumerable times. This, of course, implies either that spontaneous generation on the most astounding scale, and of animals such as horses and elephants, has been going on, as a natural process, through all the time recorded by the fossiliferous rocks; or it necessitates the belief in innumerable acts of creation repeated innumerable times. The other hypothesis is, that the successive species of animals and plants have arisen, the later by the gradual modification of the earlier. This is the hypothesis of evolution; and the paleontological discoveries of the last decade are so completely in accordance with the requirements of this hypothesis that, if it had not existed, the paleontologist would have had to invent it.

I have always had a certain horror of presuming to set a limit upon the possibilities of things. Therefore, I will not venture to say that