the group into sub-groups, within which the
resemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, the
characteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each of
the sub-groups executes its particular variations.

"Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and in
the vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; on
the canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed
in common by them, each broiders his original pattern." ("Creative
Evolution", pages 24-25.)

We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method
permits results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety
of species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most
complex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and
palaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle
in the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through
which the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the
complete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden
changes, recently observed, help us to understand more easily the
conception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing the
importance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the
trend of all our experience is the same.

Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent
probabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of
facts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently
determined.

"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by
regarding it time after time from the points to which we have access."
("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable
inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to
the biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not
suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this
striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological
layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an
order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not
really then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of
evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.

Evolution! We meet the word