CREATION BY EVOLUTION
and found therein a definite succession of fossils. Thereupon geologists jumped to the conclusion that the same succession held good everywhere else. If they discovered that it did not, but that the order was reversed, or that there were great gaps, then they explained such exceptions by saying that the rocks had been overturned or that large portions of them had been removed, and so on. On this assumed succession of the fossils the palaeontologists based a number of lines of descent of the extinct animals and plants and claimed that the changes were due to evolution. Links were admittedly missing, but sometimes a fossil was found that fitted into one of these supposed breaks; then the palaeontologists put it in and called it fresh evidence for evolution; and if the geological age did not quite suit their theory, they said the geologists were wrong, and that there must have been some disturbance of the rocks. In short, the theory was based on the succession of fossils in the rocks, and the succession of the rocks was deduced from the theory. A vicious circle if ever there was one!
So far the critics, but it is somewhat difficult to make out what explanation they would themselves give of the facts presented by the fossils. They do not deny that fossils are the remains of extinct animals. They seem to suppose that the ringed trilobites, the coiled ammonites, the armoured fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, the scaly bony fishes of the Chalk, the monstrous dinosaurs, the huge horned mammals, the great marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, and hundreds of other forms unknown to us today, all lived at the same time, though in different regions or different situations, and that the rocks are a sort of hotch-potch in which their remains occur anyhow.
This explanation, or any other conceivable interpretation of our critics’ views, only raises more difficulties and is hope-
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