which many modern geologists have made him the "father". Geikie and Zittel are much more explicit. The former[10] says that "he had reached early in life the conclusions on which his fame rests, and he never advanced beyond them." "His plain, solid, matter-of-fact intellect never branched into theory or speculation, but occupied itself wholly in the observation of facts." Zittel[11] says pretty much the same thing, remarking that "Smith confined himself to the empirical investigation of his country, and was never tempted into general speculations about the history of the formation of the earth"—words which to my mind are the very highest praise, for they seem to indicate that he was only in a very limited way responsible for the unscientific and illogical scheme of a "phylogenic series" or complete "life-history of the earth," which now passes as the science of geology. Doubtless like his little bright-eyed German contemporary, A. G. Werner, he had not had his imagination sufficiently cultivated in his youth to be able to appreciate the beauty of first assuming your premises and then proving them by means of your conclusion, i.e., first assuming that there has been a gradual development on the earth from the lowest to the highest, and then arranging the fossils from scattered localities over the earth in such a way that they cannot fail to testify to the fact.

The following may be taken as a fair statement of what he actually accomplished and taught:

"After his long period of field observations, William Smith came to the conclusion that one and the same succession of strata stretched through England from the south coast to the east, and that each individual horizon could be recognized by its particular fossils, that certain forms reappear in the same beds in the different localities, and that each fossil species belongs to a definite horizon of rock."[12]

But even granting the perfect accuracy of this generalization of Smith's for the rocks which he examined, I fail to see how it is any better than Werner's scheme, which Zittel characterizes as "weak" and premature, and of which Whewell (p. 521) says that "he promulgated, as respecting the world, a scheme collected from a province, and even too hastily gathered from that narrow field."

Quoting again from Zittel's criticism of Werner's work ("Hist. of Geology," p. 59), we must admit that Smith's observations also were "limited to a small district," and "his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks (fossils) within these narrow confines." There is, as we have shown, a monstrous jump from this to the conclusion that even these particular fossils must always occur in this particular relative order over the whole earth. How can any one deny that if we had a complete collection of all the fossils laid down during the last thousand years—when all admit that the so-called "phylogenic series" is complete—particular fossils would in many cases be found to occur only in particular rocks, and we could still arrange them in this same order from the lowest to the highest forms of life, while we might even happen to find "small districts" where the "mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines" would have all the appearance of showing a true "phylogenic" order. This of itself ought to be sufficient to show us the weakness of this subjective method of study, and the purely hypothetical and imaginary value of the fossils in determining the real age of a rock deposit.

The name of Baron Cuvier is the next that we have to consider. An examination of part of his teaching will come naturally a little later when considering "extinct species." That part of his work which related to the doctrine of Catastrophism is somewhat aside from the subject of our study; while with regard to his influence on the succession of life idea per se there is not very much that need be said. And yet Cuvier is the real founder of modern cosmological geology, and thus in a certain sense the father of biological evolution.

But if the absence of the architectonic mania for building a cosmogony will serve to remove in a great measure any suspicions with regard to William Smith's results, we cannot say the same for those of Cuvier. In his scheme the hereditary Cosmological taint, which is such an invariable characteristic of the family, is very strong, though disguised and almost transfigured by learning and genius. It is doubtless these latter qualities which have secured for the theory such a phenomenal length of life, though of course we know that nothing born of this whole brood can ever secure a permanent home in the kingdom of science.

"How glorious," wrote this otherwise truly great man in his famous "Preliminary Discourse," "it would be if we could arrange the organized products of the universe in their chronological order, as we can already (Werner's onion-coats) do with the more important mineral substances!"

His work (with that of his co-laborer Brongniart) on the fossils of the Paris basin was probably accurate and logical enough for that limited locality. It was only when he quietly assumed as Werner had done, that the rocks must always occur in this particular order all over the world, or as Whewell expresses it, "promulgated as respecting the world, a scheme collected from a province, and (perhaps) even too hastily gathered from that narrow field"—it was only, I say, when this monstrous assumption was incorporated into his scheme, and he began to call into being his vision of organic creation on the instalment plan, as Werner had done with the minerals, that his great and valuable work for science became tainted with the deadly Cosmological virus, dooming it to death sooner or later. Sherlock Holmes might attempt to diagnose a disease by a mere glance at his patient's boots, but even this gave him more data and was a more logical proceeding than the facts and methods of Cuvier supplied for constructing a scheme of organic creation.

It will not be necessary to detail the manner in which the modern "phylogenic series" was gradually pieced together from the scattered fragments here and there all over the globe; but it should be noted here that the whole chain of life was practically complete before any serious attempt was made to study the rocks on the top of the ground, and to find out how this marvellous record of the past joined on to the modern period, thus reversing completely the true inductive method, and leaving the most important of all, viz., the rocks containing human remains and other living species, over till the last, with the result that we have for over half a century been laboring under a "Glacial Nightmare," and these deposits on the top of the ground "still remain in many respects the despair of geology."

Then came Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin; and now in the light of the keen discussions instituted by Weismann in the later eighties of the last century, the modern world is pretty well agreed on two results, viz., that so far from natural selection being able to originate a species, it can't possibly originate anything at all, and also that no individual can transmit to his descendants what he has himself acquired in his lifetime, and