It would be a great error to suppose that these organic
remains were fragmentary relics. Our museums exhibit fossil shells of
immeasurable antiquity, as perfect as the day they were formed,
whole skeletons without a limb disturbed--nay, the changed flesh, the
developing embryos, and even the very footsteps of primeval organisms.
Thus the naturalist finds in the bowels of the earth species as well
defined as, and in some groups of animals more numerous than, those that
breathe the upper air. But, singularly enough, the majority of these
entombed species are wholly distinct from those that now live. Nor is
this unlikeness without its rule and order. As a broad fact, the further
we go back in time the less the buried species are like existing forms;
and the further apart the sets of extinct creatures are the less
they are like one another. In other words, there has been a regular
succession of living beings, each younger set being in a very broad and
general sense somewhat more like those which now live.

It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast
successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations en masse; but
catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least
palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted on all hands that the
seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative
to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in
assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all
the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and
formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness,
would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the
distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.

Such is a brief summary of the main truths which have been established
concerning species. Are these truths ultimate and irresolvable facts, or
are their complexities and perplexities the mere expressions of a higher
law?

A large number of persons practically assume the former position to be
correct. They believe that the writer of the Pentateuch was empowered
and commissioned to teach us scientific as well as other truth, that
the account we find there of the creation of living things is simply and
literally correct, and that anything which seems to contradict it is,
by the nature of the case, false. All the phenomena which have been
detailed are, on this view, the immedia