ted; and would be
in all respects as difficult as the crudest conception of the
creation-hypothesis. And if this absurdity drives us back to
primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too,
though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent
process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and
integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where
you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and
suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of
things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and
cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its
consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than
any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore
we are driven back upon a process _ab aeterno_ with every stage of
evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of
the whole. Whatever mitigation such a conception may offer, surely we
may be excused for still adhering to that simpler explanation which
involves a mystery indeed, but nothing so positively unthinkable as a
process without a beginning.

5. This same conception of a process without beginning, favours the
notion that since life was possible on our globe all species may well
have co-existed in varying proportions. From the sudden spread of
population through almost accidental conditions, we can imagine how
certain species might have been so scarce as to leave no trace in
geological strata, whereas those which enormously preponderated at the
same time would have done so. A change of conditions might easily cause
the former to preponderate, and their sudden appearance in the strata
would look as though they had then first come into being. In a word, we
can have good evidence for the extinction of species, but scarcely any
for their origination.

This supposition is not adverse to the derivation of species from a
common stock, but rather favours the notion that as in the case of the
individual the period of plasticity is short compared with that of
morphological stability, so if there was such an arboreal branching out
of species from a common root, it took place rapidly in conditions as
different from ours as those of uterine from extra-uterine life; and
that the stage of inflexibility may have been reached before any time of
which we have record.

But in truth when we see in the world o