CREATION BY EVOLUTION
of every living thing had been separately and specially created. Fortunately, the inquiry as to the significance of the fossils found began on the western edge of the European continental region, which has in past ages sunk repeatedly beneath the sea and then risen again to become dry land. In thus rising the fossil-bearing beds, which were deposited in successive seas and estuaries, have been somewhat tilted, and their edges have been exposed to view, so that it is easy to examine them and the fossils they contain. More than a century ago William Smith, an English land-surveyor, showed that the order of the rocks that contained these fossils is perfectly clear. Nearly all the chief phases in the succession of life are represented in the old sea beds that now form rocks in the British Isles and the adjacent parts of the European continent. Approximately the same succession has been observed in other parts of the world, and several of the greatest gaps in the geological history of Western Europe have been filled by the discovery of rocks of intervening ages elsewhere.
The order of the formation of the series of fossil-bearing rocks has thus been definitely determined by observing the order in which the layers rest one upon another and by comparing this order in detail in different parts of the world. There is nothing hypothetical in the result of this research. The main difficulty is the imperfection of the record made by the fossils. Generally no part of an animal but its hard skeleton is found; the softer parts have been preserved only in exceptional circumstances. Most of the rocks, at least those of the earlier periods, were formed in seas or estuaries, and so yield remains of land animals only where these have been carried into the water. A fossil is buried by accident and is discovered by accident. We may say that our knowledge of fossils depends on a chapter of accidents. It is not
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