planation. This calls for
special emphasis here. How should one explain the origin of uncrusted
mollusks from crusted ones through the struggle for existence, since in
such a contest the latter must have had far greater prospect of
survival than the former?

This view together with the principle of multiple origin opens up,
according to Steinmann, "the prospect of an altered conception of the
process of formation of the organic world." According to the new
conception, the many extinct forms of antiquity are not, as Darwin
supposed, "unsuccessful attempts and continued aberrations of
nature"--how this reminds one of that old, naive, much-ridiculed idea
that fossils were models that God had discarded as unserviceable--but
would gain new life and assume hitherto unsuspected relationship to the
present organic creation.

"Science, which seeks after operative causes, at the beginning of the
century regarded creation as a multiplicity of phenomena without any
causal connection as to their origin. Darwin taught as a fundamental
principle the unity and the causal inter-relation of creation, but was
not entirely able to save this hypothesis from a violent and sudden
death. In the future sketch creation will appear as wholly restricted
in itself and lasting, the causes of its limitation lie, up to the time
of the intervention of men, solely in the balanced motion of the planet
which it peoples."

At the close of his address Steinmann points out that behind the
problem of the manner of development, there stands "the unsolved
question regarding its operative causes." "Regarding this point," he
continues, "opinions have perhaps never been so divergent as they are
to-day. The times have passed when the Darwinian explanations were
regarded with naive confidence as the alpha and omega of the doctrine
of Descent. Not only are the adherents of Darwinian ideas divided among
themselves, but the theory of Lamarck, somewhat altered, favored by the
results of historical investigation, appears more striking and now
seems more in harmony with facts than formerly. What is considered by
one as the ruling factor in the evolution of organisms is regarded by
another as a "quantite negligeable" or even as the greatest mistake of
the century. In this discord of opinions the principle of Descent alone
forms the stable pole."

Thus Steinmann, and we can but applaud his conclusions with undisguised
pleasure, for they tend throughout in the direction