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Intermediate or generalized Forms of extinct Animals, an indication of Transmutation or Development.

The misconception of this writer illustrates another point very frequently overlooked. It is an essential part of Mr. Darwin's theory, that one existing animal has not been derived from any other existing animal, but that both are the descendants of a common ancestor, which was at once different from either, but, in essential characters, intermediate between them both. The illustration of the duck and the gull is therefore misleading; one of these birds has not been derived from the other, but both from a common ancestor. This is not a mere supposition invented to support the theory of natural selection, but is founded on a variety of indisputable facts. As we go back into past time, and meet with the fossil remains of more and more ancient races of extinct animals, we find that many of them actually are intermediate between distinct groups of existing animals. Professor Owen continually dwells on this fact: he says in his "Palæontology," p. 284: "A more generalized vertebrate structure is illustrated, in the extinct reptiles, by the affinities to ganoid fishes, shown by Ganocephala, Labyrinthodontia, and Icthyopterygia; by the affinities of the Pterosauria to Birds, and by the approximation of the Dinosauria to Mammals. (These have been recently shown by Professor Huxley to have more affinity to Birds.) It is manifested by the combination of modern crocodilian, chelonian, and lacertian characters

in the Cryptodontia and the Dicnyodontia, and by the combined lacertian and crocodilian characters in the Thecodontia and Sauropterygia." In the same work he tells us that, "the Anoplotherium, in several important characters resembled the embryo Ruminant, but retained throughout life those marks of adhesion to a generalized mammalian type ;"-and assures us that he has "never omitted a proper opportunity for impressing the results of observations showing the more generalized structures of extinct as compared with the more specialized forms of recent animals." Modern palæontologists have discovered hundreds of examples of these more generalized or ancestral types. In the time of Cuvier, the Ruminants and the Pachyderms were looked upon as two of the most distinct orders of animals; but it is now demonstrated that there once existed a variety of genera and species, connecting by almost imperceptible grades such widely different animals as the pig and the camel. Among living quadrupeds we can scarcely find a more isolated group than the genus Equus, comprising the horses, asses, and Zebras; but through many species of Paloplotherium, Hippotherium, and Hipparion, and numbers of extinct forms of Equus found in Europe, India, and America, an almost complete transition is established with the Eocene Anoplotherium and Paleotherium, which are also generalized or ancestral types of the Tapir and Rhinoceros. The recent researches of M. Gaudry in Greece have furnished much new evidence of the same character. In the Miocene beds of Pikermi

he has discovered the group of the Simocyonidæ intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyænictis which connects the hyænas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe with the deer and antelopes.

Between reptiles and fishes an intermediate type has been found in the Archegosaurus of the Coal formation; while the Labyrinthodon of the Trias combined characters of the Batrachia with those of crocodiles, lizards, and ganoid fishes. Even birds, the most apparently isolated of all living forms, and the most rarely preserved in a fossil state, have been shown to possess undoubted affinities with reptiles; and in the Oolitic Archæopteryx, with its lengthened tail, feathered on each side, we have one of the connecting links from the side of birds; while Professor Huxley has recently shown that the entire order of Dinosaurians have remarkable affinities to birds, and that one of them, the Compsognathus, makes a nearer approach to bird organisation than does Archeopteryx to that of reptiles.

Analogous facts to these occur in other classes of animals, as an example of which we have the authority of a distinguished paleontologist, M. Barande, quoted by Mr. Darwin, for the statement, that although the Paleozoic Invertebrata can certainly be classed under existing groups, yet at this ancient period the groups were not so distinctly separated from each other as they are now; while Mr. Scudder tells us, that some of

the fossil insects discovered in the Coal formation of America offer characters intermediate between those of existing orders. Agassiz, again, insists strongly that the more ancient animals resemble the embryonic forms of existing spccies; but as the embryos of distinct groups are known to resemble each other more than the adult animals (and in fact to be undistinguishable at a very early age), this is the same as saying that the ancient animals are exactly what, on Darwin's theory, the ancestors of existing animals ought to be; and this, it must be remembered, is the evidence of one of the strongest opponents of the theory of natural selection.

Conclusion.

I have thus endeavoured to meet fairly, and to answer plainly, a few of the most common objections to the theory of natural selection, and I have done so in every case by referring to admitted facts and to logical deductions from those facts.

As an indication and general summary of the line of argument I have adopted, I here give a brief demonstration in a tabular form of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, referring for the facts to Mr. Darwin's works, and to the pages in this volume, where they are more or less fully treated.

A Demonstration of the Origin of Species by Natural

PROVED FACTS.

Selection.

RAPID INCREASE OF ORGANISMS, pp. 29, 265; (“Origin of Species," p. 75, 5th Ed.) TOTAL NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS STATIONARY, pp. 30, 266.

STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. HEREDITY WITH VARIATION, or general likeness with individual differences of parents and offspring, pp. 266, 287-291, 308; ("Origin of Species," chap. I., II., V.)

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. CHANGE OF EXTERNAL CONDITIONS, universal and unceasing. See "Lyell's Principles of Geology."

NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES (afterwards taken as Proved Facts).

STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE, the deaths equalling the births on the average, p. 30; ("Origin of Species," chap. III.)

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, or Natural Selection; meaning simply, that on the whole those die who are least fitted to maintain their existence; ("Origin of Species," chap. IV.)

CHANGES OF ORGANIC FORMS, to keep them in harmony with the Changed Conditions; and as the changes of conditions are permanent changes, in the sense of not reverting back to identical previous conditions, the changes of organic forms must be in the same sense permanent, and thus originate SPECIES.

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