Decadence of Darwinism 69 the omithorynchus in Australia and Tasmania, they have reached their present abodes by evolution through fishes. Let him assume it, but we beg for mercy to the man on the street who shrinks from that mode of transportation and believes that they might have been created in Western Asia, dispersed by various possible means, wherever climatic and other conditions were favorable, and suffered extinction, ex cept where we find them; or that they might have been created where they are. The rapid extinction of the American bison suggests the possibility of extinction, as a factor of the process. GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION Professor Huxley adduces only one more argument— successive geological forms. “It must”, he remarks, “suffice in this place, to say that the successive forms of the Equine type have been fully worked out, while those of nearly all the other existing types of Ungulate mammals and of the Carnivora have been nearly as closely followed through the Tertiary deposits”. We have a misty remembrance of hav ing met that Equus before, and, somehow, associate him with pons asinorum. The Professor hangs his case on the term “successive”—“successive geological forms”. He con fuses it with “similar”, but neither is offensive. Fossils and living forms belong in the same category, but a radical dif ference between “successive” forms breaks the chain of evo lution. I f the ungulate fossils are like living forms, we greet them as old friends, if unlike we beg an introduction. In either event it is not Darwinism, but Don Quixote at tacking another windmill. The actual origination of man, brutes and plants, from one simplest and lowest form of organic life, by natural and Godless selections and variations, is the essence of Dar winism. I t is admitted and undisputed that it was first definitely elaborated by Charles R. Darwin, and it stands or falls with Darwin’s experiments and arguments, and they are
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