hence it is hard to see how he can transmit what he has not got himself and what none of his ancestors ever had.

I have not the space to show how Agassiz further complicated the problem immensely by his absurdly illogical use of his three "laws" of comparison, when the prime fact of there ever having been a succession of life on the globe in any order whatever had never been proved; but I am free to say that if Cuvier's system of creation on the instalment plan had been fact instead of fancy, some scheme of evolution would undoubtedly be implied in this general fact. It is this instinctive feeling on the part of modern scientists which makes them to-day, while confessing the failure of Darwinism, still cling to the general idea of evolution somehow. Hence it seems quite evident that, having deviated from strict inductive methods by pursuing this ignis fatuus of a cosmological history of creation, it was essential in the interests of true science to go the whole journey and make a complete investigation of the biological side of the question, in order to complete the demonstration that science was on a wrong tack entirely. Darwin and Weismann were inevitable in view of the wholly unscientific course on which biology entered under the guidance of Buffon and Cuvier.

What then can we take as the general lesson to be learned from the stubborn way in which, for over a hundred years, the world has followed this hypnotic suggestion of folly, that we might explain our genesis and being from the scientific standpoint? One of the lessons—there may be others—is that science knows nothing about origins, and that, in speculating along these lines, the cosmological taint will always vitiate the accuracy of our conclusions and debauch the true spirit of induction. A hundred years ago, they thought they knew all about how the world was made. The keen investigations inspired by Darwinism were necessary to convince us that we know nothing at all about it. Modern biology has simply developed a gigantic reductio ad absurdum argument against the easy assumptions of the earlier geologists that it occurred by a progression from the low to the high. A hundred years—nay fifty years ago—this assumption did not appear so unscientific, for we did not then have the biological evidence to refute such an idea. Now, however, in the light of the modern progress of science, this awful mystery of our existence, of our creation and destiny, is borne in upon us from every dividing cell, from every sprouting seed, from countless millions of the eloquent voices of nature, which our forefathers were too blind to see, too deaf to understand; and with weary, reluctant sadness does science confess that about it all she knows absolutely nothing.

CHAPTER III
FACT NUMBER ONE

Hitherto we have been dealing only with the a priori aspects of the succession of life idea. We have seen that it is really based on two primary assumptions, viz.:

(1) That over all the earth the fossils must always occur in the particular order in which they were found to occur in a few corners of Western Europe; and also—

(2) That in the long ago there were no such things as zoological provinces and zones, and totally different types of fossils from separated localities could not possibly have been contemporaneous with one another as we know they are to-day in "recent" deposits.[13]

On the blending of these two assumptions, the latter essentially absurd, and the former long ago disproved by the facts of the rocks, has been built up the towering structure of a complete "phylogenic series" from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene. The way in which, as we have been, Spencer and Huxley treated this subject, reminds us very much of the old advice, "When you meet with an insuperable difficulty, look it steadfastly in the face—and pass on." For neither they nor any of their thousands of followers have ever, so far as I know, pointed out the horrible logic in taking this immense complex of guesses and assumptions as the starting-point for new departures, the solid foundation for detailed "investigations" as to just how this wonderful phenomenon of development has occurred. For after Agassiz and his contemporaries had built on these large assumptions of Cuvier, and had arranged the details and the exact order of these successive forms by comparison with the embryonic life of the modern individual, the evolutionists of our time, led by such men as Spencer and Haeckel, with their "philogenetic principle," prove their theory of evolution by showing that the embryonic life of the individual is only "a brief recapitulation, as it were from memory," of the geological succession in time. There would really seem to be little hope of reaching with any arguments a generation of scientists who can elaborate genealogical trees of descent for the different families and genera of the animal kingdom, based wholly on such a series of assumptions and blind guesses, and then palm off their work on a credulous world as the proved results of inductive science.

And yet I am tempted to make some effort in this direction. And since we have now examined the a priori aspects of the question, it remains to test the two above mentioned assumptions by the facts of the rocks. The second, indeed, involving as it does a profound supernatural knowledge of the past, and being so positively contrary to all that we know of the modern world as to seem essentially absurd, is yet by its very nature beyond the reach of any tests that we can bring to bear upon it. Hence it remains to test by the facts of the rocks the assumption that all over the earth the fossils invariably occur in the particular order in which they were first found in a few corners of Western Europe by the founders of the science. Have we already a sufficiently broad knowledge of the rocks of the world to decide such a question? I think we have.

To begin then at the beginning, let us try to find out how we can fix on the rocks which are absolutely the oldest on the globe. We would expect to find a good many patches of them here and there, but there must be some common characteristic by which they may be distinguished wherever found. Of course, when I say "rocks" here I mean fossils, for as has long been agreed upon by geologists, mineral and mechanical characters are of practically no use in determining the age of deposits, and we are here dealing only with life and the order in which it has occurred on the globe. Accordingly our problem is really to find that typical group of fossils which is essentially older than all dissimilar groups of fossils.

In most localities we do not have to go very far down[14] into the earth to find granite or other so-called igneous rocks, which not only do not contain any traces of fossils, but which we have no proper reason for supposing ever contained any. These Azoic or Archaean rocks constitute practically all the earth's crust, there being only a thin skim of fossiliferous strata on the outside somewhat like the skin on an apple. Now it would be natural enough to suppose that those fossils which occur at the bottom, or next to the Archaean, are the oldest. This is doubtless what the earlier geologists had in mind, or at least ought to