And, in view of the facts of geology, it follows that all living animals and plants "are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch."[1]
It is an obvious consequence of this theory of Descent with Modification, as it is sometimes called, that all plants and animals, however different they may now be, must, at one time or other, have been connected by direct or indirect intermediate gradations, and that the appearance of isolation presented by various groups of organic beings must be unreal.
No part of Mr. Darwin's work ran more directly counter to the prepossessions of naturalists twenty years ago than this. And such prepossessions were very excusable, for there was undoubtedly a great deal to be said, at that time, in favor of the fixity of species and of the existence of great breaks, which there was no obvious or probable means of filling up, between various groups of organic beings.
For various reasons, scientific and unscientific, much had been made of the hiatus between man and the rest of the higher mammalia, and it is no wonder that issue was first joined on this part of the controversy. I have no wish to revive past and happily forgotten controversies, but I must state the simple fact that the distinctions in cerebral and other characters, which were so hotly affirmed to separate man from all other animals in 1860, have all been demonstrated to be non-existent, and that the contrary doctrine is now universally accepted and taught.
But there were other cases in which the wide structural gaps asserted to exist between one group of animals and another were by no means fictitious; and, when such structural breaks were real Mr. Darwin could account for them only by supposing that the intermediate forms which once existed had become extinct. In a remarkable passage he says: "We may thus account even for the distinctness of whole classes from each other—for instance, of birds from all vertebrate animals—by the belief that many animal forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progenitors of the other vertebrate classes."[2]
Adverse criticism made merry over such suggestions as these. Of course it was easy to get out of the difficulty by supposing extinction; .but, where was the slightest evidence that such intermediate forms between birds and reptiles as the hypothesis required ever existed? And then probably followed a tirade upon this terrible forsaking of the paths of "Baconian induction."
But the progress of knowledge has justified Mr. Darwin to an extent which could hardly have been anticipated. In 1862 the specimen of Archæopteryx, which until the last two or three years has remained unique, was discovered; and it is an animal which, in its feathers and the greater part of its organization, is a veritable bird, while, in other parts, it is as distinctly reptilian.
