Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/609

Rh may similarly be met by the counter-demand for facts in support of the doctrine opposed to it. Perhaps Lord Salisbury will meet this demand by quoting the statements contained in the book of Genesis. But even if, ignoring the skepticism of professed biblical critics, such as the Rev. Prof. Cheyne, he puts absolute faith in these statements current among nomadic groups of shepherds three thousand years ago, he is obliged to admit that these alleged facts are not of the class he refers to when he asks for proof of the hypothesis of natural selection: they are not facts of direct observation.

Thus, supposing the two hypotheses—special creation and evolution by natural selection—are to be tested by the directly observed facts assigned in their support, then, if the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection is to be rejected because there are no directly observed facts which prove it, the hypothesis of special creation must be rejected for the same reason. Nobody has seen a species evolved and nobody has seen a species created.

But now from the question of direct evidence let us pass to the question of indirect evidence. Let us ask if there are any positive facts of observation which tend to justify the one, and whether there are any positive facts of observation which tend to justify the other. Here a comparison leads to widely different results. Familiar though some of the facts are, I must be excused for specifying them, since Lord Salisbury ignores them.

Though, because most of the geological record has been destroyed while the remnant has been dislocated or blurred, and because so small a part—an infinitesimal part—of this remnant has been examined, paleontology furnishes but broken evidence, yet the more the Earth's strata are examined the more they testify that organic forms have arisen by modifications upon modifications. Recent discoveries, especially those which show by intermediate forms that the bird-type is derived from the reptile-type, and those which show that, beginning with the four-toed Orohippus of the Eocene strata, we ascend in later strata, through Mesohippus, Miohippus, Protohippus, and Pliohippus, up to the modern horse, have given strong support to the hypothesis of evolution: support so strong that Prof. Huxley, who had up to the time he saw Prof. Marsh's fossils made reservations in his acceptance of the hypothesis, thereafter accepted it without reserve. Not only do fossils furnish in this and other cases the lines of linear ascent to existing forms, but they simultaneously disclose a general fact of great significance—the fact that early types of creatures in any class display the commonest or most general traits of structure, and that later types of the same class are more specialized in this or that direction: relationships which are