rollary of his views.

Among the most recent examples of antagonism to the Evolution-Theory, the
most interesting is a book by Fleischmann, professor of zoology in
Erlangen, published in 1901, and entitled, "The Theory of Descent." It
consists of "popular lectures on the rise and decline of a scientific
hypothesis" (namely, the Theory of Descent), and it is a complete
recantation by a quondam Darwinian of the doctrine of his school, even of
its fundamental proposition, the concept of evolution itself. For
Fleischmann is not guilty, like Weismann, of the inaccuracy of using
"Theory of Descent" as equivalent to Darwinism; he is absolutely
indifferent to the theory of natural selection. His book keeps strictly to
matters of fact, and rejects as speculation everything in the least beyond
these; it does not express even an opinion on the question of the origin
of species, but merely criticises and analyses.

It does not bring forward any new and overwhelming arguments in refutation
of the Theory of Descent, but strongly emphasises difficulties that have
always beset it, and discusses these in detail. The old dispute which
interested Goethe, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Cuvier, as to the unity or
the fundamental heterogeneity of the "architectural plan" in nature is
revived. Modern zoology recognises not merely the four types of Cuvier,
but seventeen different styles, "phyla," or groups of forms, to derive one
of which from another is hopeless. And what is true of the whole is true
also of the subdivisions within each phylum; _e.g._, within the vertebrate
phylum with its fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. No bridge
leads from one to the other. This is proved particularly by the very
instance which is the favourite illustration in support of the Theory of
Descent--the fin of fishes and its relation to the five-fingered hand of
vertebrates. The so-called transition forms (Archaeopteryx, monotremes,
&c.) are discredited. So with the "stalking-horse" of evolutionists--the
genealogical tree of the Equidae, which is said to be traceable
palaeontologically right back, without a break, from the one-toed horses of
the present day to the normal five-toed ancestry; and so with another
favourite instance of evolution, the history of the pond-snails
(_Planorbis multiformis_), the numerous varieties of which occur with
transitions between them in actual contiguity in the Steinheim beds, and
thus seem to afford an obvious example