whelming idea does this give us of the destruction of whole piles of rock, miles in thickness and covering areas comparable with those of continents; and how great must have been the loss of the innumerable fossil forms which those rocks contained! In view of such destruction we are forced to conclude that our palaeontological collections, rich though they may appear, are really but small and random samples, giving no adequate idea of the mighty series of organism which have lived upon the earth.[1]
Admitting, however, the extreme imperfection of the geological record as a whole, it may be urged that certain limited portions of it are fairly complete—as, for example, the various Miocene deposits of India, Europe, and North America,—and that in these we ought to find many examples of species and genera linked together by intermediate forms. It may be replied that in several cases this really occurs; and the reason why it does not occur more often is, that the theory of evolution requires that distinct genera should be linked together, not by a direct passage, but by the descent of both from a common ancestor, which may have lived in some much earlier age the record of which is either wanting or very incomplete. An illustration given by Mr. Darwin will make this more clear to those who have not studied the subject. The fantail and pouter pigeons are two very distinct and unlike breeds, which we yet know to have been both derived from the common wild rock-pigeon. Now, if we had every variety of living pigeon before us, or even all those which have lived during the present century, we should find no intermediate types between these two—none combining in any degree the characters of the pouter with that of the fantail. Neither should we ever find such an intermediate form, even had there been preserved a specimen of every breed of pigeon since the ancestral rock-pigeon was first tamed by man—a period of probably several thousand years. We thus see that a complete passage from one very distinct species to another could not be expected even had we a complete record of the life of any one period. What we require is a complete
- ↑ The reader who desires to understand this subject more fully, should study chap. x. of the Origin of Species, and chap. xiv. of Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.
