e friendly terms with the "archetype" whereby the Creator was guided
"amidst the crash of falling worlds." Just as it used to be imagined
that the ancient world was physically opposed to the present, so it is
still widely assumed that the living population of our globe, whether
animal or vegetable, in the older epochs, exhibited forms so strikingly
contrasted with those which we see around us, that there is hardly
anything in common between the two. It is constantly tacitly assumed
that we have before us all the forms of life which have ever existed;
and though the progress of knowledge, yearly and almost monthly,
drives the defenders of that position from their ground, they entrench
themselves in the new line of defences as if nothing had happened, and
proclaim that the NEW beginning is the REAL beginning.

Without for an instant denying or endeavouring to soften down the
considerable positive differences (the negative ones are met by another
line of argument) which undoubtedly obtain between the ancient and the
modern worlds of life, we believe they have been vastly overstated and
exaggerated, and this belief is based upon certain facts whose value
does not seem to have been fully appreciated, though they have long been
more or less completely known.

The multitudinous kinds of animals and plants, both recent and fossil,
are, as is well known, arranged by zoologists and botanists, in
accordance with their natural relations, into groups which receive the
names of sub-kingdoms, classes, orders, families, genera and species.
Now it is a most remarkable circumstance that, viewed on the great
scale, living beings have differed so little throughout all geologic
time that there is no sub-kingdom and no class wholly extinct or without
living representatives.

If we descend to the smaller groups, we find that the number of orders
of plants is about two hundred; and I have it on the best authority that
not one of these is exclusively fossil; so that there is absolutely not
a single extinct ordinal type of vegetable life; and it is not until we
descend to the next group, or the families, that we find types which are
wholly extinct. The number of orders of animals, on the other hand, may
be reckoned at a hundred and twenty, or thereabouts, and of these,
eight or nine have no living representatives. The proportion of extinct
ordinal types of animals to the existing types, therefore, does not
exceed seven per cent--a marvellously