Chapter VII: Part 7

Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde which had reached a land charged with the seeds of yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these physical characters are accompanied by comparative or absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable tendency would be to the preservation and multiplication of the darker and woollier families, and the elimination of the whiter and smoother-haired. In fact, by the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given rise to a race of black pigs in the forests of Louisiana, a negro stock would eventually people the region.

Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable generations, and have found ample time for the hereditary hardening of its special peculiarities into the enduring characters of a persistent modification.

Nor, if it be true that the physiological difference of species may be produced by variation and natural selection, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all astonishing if, in some of these separated stocks, the process of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satisfactory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility in the unions of members of two of the "persistent modifications" of mankind, might well be appealed to by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his views regarding the origin of species in general.

VIII.

ON SOME FIXED POINTS IN BRITISH ETHNOLOGY.

In view of the many discussions to which the complicated problems offered by the ethnology of the British Islands have given rise, it may be useful to attempt to pick out, from amidst the confused masses of assertion and of inference, those propositions which appear to rest upon a secure foundation, and to state the evidence by which they are supported. Such is the purpose of the present paper.

Some of these well-based propositions relate to the physical characters of the people of Britain and their neighbours; while others concern the languages which they spoke. I shall deal, in the first place, with the physical questions.

I. _Eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised people of two types of complexion--the one fair, and the other dark. The dark people resembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people were like the Belgic Gauls._

The chief direct evidence of the truth of this proposition is the well-known passage of Tacitus:--

"Ceterum Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigenae
an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. Habitus
corporum varii: atque ex eo argumenta: nam rutilae Caledoniam
habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem asseverant.
Silurum colorati vultus et torti plerumque crines, et posita
contra Hispaniam, Iberos veteres trajecisse, easque sedes
occupasse, fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu
durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris,
positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen
aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse, credibile est;
eorum sacra deprehendas, superstitionum persuasione; sermo
haud multum diversus."[1]

[Footnote 1: Taciti Agricola, c. 11.]

This passage, it will be observed, contains statements as to facts, and certain conclusions deduced from these facts. The matters of fact asserted are: firstly, that the inhabitants of Britain exhibit much diversity in their physical characters; secondly, that the Caledonians are red-haired and large-limbed, like the Germans; thirdly, that the Silures have curly hair and dark complexions, like the people of Spain; fourthly, that the British people nearest Gaul resemble the "Galli."

Tacitus, therefore, states positively what the Caledonians and Silures were like; but the interpretation of what he says about the other Britons must depend upon what we learn from other sources as to the characters of these "Galli." Here the testimony of "divus Julius" comes in with great force and appropriateness. Caesar writes:--

"Britanniae pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in
insula ipsi memoria proditum dicunt: marituma pars ab iis,
qui predae ac belli inferendi causa ex Belgio transierant; qui
omnes fere iis nominibus civitatum appellantur quibus orti ex
civitatibus eo pervenerunt, et bello inlato ibi permanserunt
atque agros colere coeperunt."[1]

[Footnote 1: De Bello Gallico, v. 12.]

From these passages it is obvious that in the opinion of Caesar and Tacitus, the southern Britons resembled the northern Gauls, and especially the Belgae; and the evidence of Strabo is decisive as to the characters in which the two people resembled one another: "The men (of Britain) are taller than the Kelts, with hair less yellow; they are slighter in their persons."[1]

[Footnote 1: "The Geography of Strabo." Translated by Hamilton and Falconer; v. 5.]

The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable ground for doubting that, at the time of the Roman conquest, Britain contained people of two types, the one dark and the other fair complexioned, and that there was a certain difference between the latter in the north and in the south of Britain: the northern folk being, in the judgment of Tacitus, or, more properly, according to the information he had received from Agricola and others, more similar to the Germans than the latter. As to the distribution of these stocks, all that is clear is, that the dark people were predominant in certain parts of the west of the southern half of Britain, while the fair stock appears to have furnished the chief elements of the population elsewhere.

No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks. The indirect evidence is not very satisfactory. The tumuli of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two extremely different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long; and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of the ancient Gauls[1]. The suggestion is obvious that the one form of skull may have been associated with the fair, and the other with the dark, complexion. But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia at the present day--the south-western Germans and the Swiss being markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly long-headed.

[Footnote 1: See Dr. Thurnam "On the Two principal Forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls."]

What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, and for centuries afterwards, we have no certain knowledge; but the earliest trustworthy records prove the existence, side by side with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland as in Britain. The long form of skull is predominant among the ancient, as among modern, Irish.

II. _The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans, did not differ in any important physical character._

The terms in which the ancient writers describe both Gauls and Germans are identical. They are always tall people, with massive limbs, fair skins, fierce blue eyes, and hair the colour of which ranges from red to yellow. Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations from a cloud of witnesses.

An attempt has been made to show that the colour of the hair of the Gauls must have differed very much from that which obtained among the Germans, on the strength of the story told by Suetonius (Caligula, 4), that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by picking out the tallest, and making them "rutilare et summittere comam."

The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:--

"It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that
Caligula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves
that the Belgae were already sensibly different from their
ancestors, whom Strabo had found almost identical with their
_brothers_ on the other side of the Rhine."

But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, proves nothing; for the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair. Ammianus Marcellinus[1] tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the Roman commander, Jovinus, surprised a body of Alemanni near the town now called Charpeigne, in the valley of the Moselle; and how the Roman soldiers, as, concealed by the thick wood, they stole upon their unsuspecting enemies, saw that some were bathing and others "comas rutilantes ex more." More than two centuries earlier Pliny gives indirect evidence to the same effect when he says of soap:--

[Footnote 1: Res Gestae, xxvii.]

"Galliarum hoc inventum rutilandis capillis ... apud Germanos
majore in usu viris quam foeminis."[1]

[Footnote 1: Historia Naturalis, xxviii. 51.]

Here we have a writer who flourished only a short time after the date of the Caligula story, telling us that the Gauls invented soap for the purpose of doing that which, according to Suetonius, Caligula forced them to do. And, further, the combined and independent testimony of Pliny and Ammianus assures us that the Germans were as much in the habit of reddening their hair as the Gauls. As to De Belloguet's supposition that, even in Caligula's time, the Gauls had become darker than their ancestors were, it is directly contradicted by Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew the Gauls well. "Celsioris staturae et candidi poene Galli sunt onions, et rutili, luminumque torvitate terribiles," is his description; and it would fit the Gauls who sacked Rome.

III. _In none of the invasions of Britain which have taken place since the Roman dominion, has any other type of man been introduced than one or other of the two which existed during that dominion_.

The North Germans, who effected what is commonly called the Saxon conquest of Britain, were, most assuredly, a fair, yellow, or red-haired, blue eyed, long-skulled people. So were the Danes and the Norsemen who followed them; though it is very possible that the active slave trade which went on, and the intercourse with Ireland, may have introduced a certain admixture of the dark stock into both Denmark and Norway. The Norman conquest brought in new ethnological elements, the precise value of which cannot be estimated with exactness; but as to their quality, there can be no question, inasmuch as even the wide area from which William drew his followers could yield him nothing but the fair and the dark types of men, already present in Britain. But whether the Norman settlers, on the whole, strengthened the fair or the dark element, is a problem, the elements of the solution of which are not attainable.

I am unable to discover any grounds for believing that a Lapp element has ever entered into the population of these islands. So far as the physical evidence goes, it is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that the only constituent stocks of that population, now, or at any other period about which we have evidence, are the dark whites, whom I have proposed to call "_Melanochroi_" and the fair whites, or "_Xanthochroi._"

IV. _The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Britain are, speaking broadly, distributed, at present, as they were in the time of Tacitus; and their representatives on the continent of Europe have the same general distribution as at the earliest period of which we have any record._

At the present day, and notwithstanding the extensive intermixture effected by the movements consequent on civilization and on political changes, there is a predominance of dark men in the west, and of fair men in the east and north, of Britain. At the present day, as from the earliest times, the predominant constituents of the riverain population of the North Sea and the eastern half of the British Channel, are fair men. The fair stock continues in force through Central Europe, until it is lost in Central Asia. Offshoots of this stock extend into Spain, Italy, and Northern India, and by way of Syria and North Africa, to the Canary Islands. They were known in very early times to the Chinese, and in still earlier to the ancient Egyptians, as frontier tribes. The Thracians were notorious for their fair hair and blue eyes many centuries before our era.

On the other hand, the dark stock predominates in Southern and Western France, in Spain, along the Ligurian shore, and in Western and Southern Italy; in Greece, Asia, Syria, and North Africa; in Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and Hindostan, shading gradually, through all stages of darkening, into the type of the modern Egyptian, or of the wild Hill-man of the Dekkan. Nor is there any record of the existence of a different population in all these countries.

The extreme north of Europe, and the northern part of Western Asia, are at present occupied by a Mongoloid stock, and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, may be assumed to have been so peopled from a very remote epoch. But, as I have said, I can find no evidence that this stock ever took part in peopling Britain. Of the three great stocks of mankind which extend from the western coast of the great Eurasiatic continent to its southern and eastern shores, the Mongoloids occupy a vast triangle, the base of which is the whole of Eastern Asia, while its apex lies in Lapland. The Melanochroi, on the other hand, may be represented as a broad band stretching from Ireland to Hindostan; while the Xanthochroic area lies between the two, thins out, so to speak, at either end, and mingles, at its margins, with both its neighbours.

Such is a brief and summary statement of what I believe to be the chief facts relating to the physical ethnology of the people of Britain. The conclusions which I draw from these and other facts are (1) That the Melanochroi and the Xanthochroi are two separate races in the biological sense of the word race; (2) That they have had the same general distribution as at present from the earliest times of which any record exists on the continent of Europe; (3) That the population of the British Islands is derived from them, and from them only.

The people of Europe, however, owe their national names, not to their physical characteristics, but to their languages, or to their political relations; which, it is plain, need not have the slightest relation to these characteristics.

Thus, it is quite certain that, in Caesar's time, Gaul was divided politically into three nationalities--the Belgae, the Celtae, and the Aquitani; and that the last were very widely different, both in language and in physical characteristics, from the two former. The Belgae and the Celtae, on the other hand, differed comparatively little either in physique or in language. On the former point there is the distinct testimony of Strabo; as to the latter, St. Jerome states that the "Galatians had almost the same language as the Treviri." Now, the Galatians were emigrant Volcae Tectosages, and therefore Celtae; while the Treviri were Belgae.

At the present day, the physical characters of the people of Belgic Gaul remain distinct from those of the people of Aquitaine, notwithstanding the immense changes which have taken place since Caesar's time; but Belgae, Celtae, and Aquitani (all but a mere fraction of the last two, represented by the Basques and the Britons) are fused into one nationality, "le peuple Français." But they have adopted the language of one set of invaders, and the name of another; their original names and languages having almost disappeared. Suppose that the French language remained as the sole evidence of the existence of the population of Gaul, would the keenest philologer arrive at any other conclusion than that this population was essentially and fundamentally a "Latin" race, which had had some communication with Celts and Teutons? Would he so much as suspect the former existence of the Aquitani?

Community of language testifies to close contact between the people who speak the language, but to nothing else; philology has absolutely nothing to do with ethnology, except so far as it suggests the existence or the absence of such contact. The contrary assumption, that language is a test of race, has introduced the utmost confusion into ethnological speculation, and has nowhere worked greater scientific and practical mischief than in the ethnology of the British Islands.

What is known, for certain, about the languages spoken in these islands and their affinities may, I believe, be summed up as follows:--

I. _At the time of the Roman conquest, one language, the Celtic, under two principal dialectical divisions, the Cymric and the Gaelic, was spoken throughout the British Islands. Cymric was spoken in Britain, Gaelic in Ireland._

If a language allied to Basque had in earlier times been spoken in the British Islands, there is no evidence that any Euskarian-speaking people remained at the time of the Roman conquest. The dark and the fair population of Britain alike spoke Celtic tongues, and therefore the name "Celt" is as applicable to the one as to the other.

What was spoken in Ireland can only be surmised by reasoning from the knowledge of later times; but there seems to be no doubt that it was Gaelic; and that the Gaelic dialect was introduced into the Western Highlands by Irish invaders.

II. _The Belgae and the Celtae, with the offshoots of the latter in Asia Minor, spoke dialects of the Cymric division of Celtic_.

The evidence of this proposition lies in the statement of St. Jerome before cited; in the similarity of the names of places in Belgic Gaul and in Britain; and in the direct comparison of sundry ancient Gaulish and Belgic words which have been preserved, with the existing Cymric dialects, for which I must refer to the learned work of Brandes.

Formerly, as at the present day, the Cymric dialects of Celtic were spoken by both the fair and the dark stocks.

III. _There is no record of Gaelic being spoken anywhere save in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man_.

This appears to be the final result of the long discussions which have taken place on this much-debated question. As is the case with the Cymric dialects, Gaelic is now spoken by both dark and fair stocks.

IV. _When the Teutonic languages first became known, they were spoken only Xanthochroi, that is to say, by the Germans, the Scandinavians, and Goths. And they were imported by Xanthochroi into Gaul and into Britain._

In Gaul the imported Teutonic dialect has been completely overpowered by the more or less modified Latin, which it found already in possession; and what Teutonic blood there may be in modern Frenchmen is not adequately represented in their language. In Britain, on the contrary, the Teutonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing forms of speech, and the people are vastly less "Teutonic" than their language. Whatever may have been the extent to which the Celtic-speaking population of the eastern half of Britain was trodden out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking Saxons and Danes, it is quite certain that no considerable displacement of the Celtic-speaking people occurred in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland; and that nothing approaching to the extinction of that people took place in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain generally. Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic English language is now spoken throughout Britain, except by an insignificant fraction of the population in Wales and the Western Highlands. But it is obvious that this fact affords not the slightest justification for the common practice of speaking of the present inhabitants of Britain as an "Anglo-Saxon" people. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of talking of the French people as a "Latin" race, because they speak a language which is, in the main, derived from Latin. And the absurdity becomes the more patent when those who have no hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cornish man, an "Anglo-Saxon," would think it ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and his forefathers may have spoken English for as long a time as the Cornish man.

Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge, contained like Britain, a dark and a fair stock, which, there is every reason to believe, were identical with the dark and the fair stocks of Britain. When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians made continual incursions upon, and settlements among them, the Teutonic languages made no more way among the Irish than they did among the French. How much Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence to show. But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., the English people, consisting in part of the descendants of Cymric speakers, and in part of the descendants of Teutonic speakers, made good their footing in the eastern half of the island, as the Saxons and Danes made good theirs in England; and did their best to complete the parallel by attempting the extirpation of the Gaelic-speaking Irish. And they succeeded to a considerable extent; a large part of Eastern Ireland is now peopled by men who are substantially English by descent, and the English language has spread over the land far beyond the limits of English blood.

Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like the people of Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and Xanthochroi. They resembled the Britons in speaking a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a Cymric form of the Celtic language. Ireland was untouched by the Roman conquest, nor do the Saxons seem to have had any influence upon her destinies, but the Danes and Norsemen poured in a contingent of Teutonism, which has been largely supplemented by English and Scotch efforts.

What, then, is the value of the ethnological difference between the Englishman of the western half of England and the Irishman of the eastern half of Ireland? For what reason does the one deserve the name of a "Celt," and not the other? And further, if we turn to the inhabitants of the western half of Ireland, why should the term "Celts" be applied to them more than to the inhabitants of Cornwall? And if the name is applicable to the one as justly as to the other, why should not intelligence, perseverance, thrift, industry, sobriety, respect for law, be admitted to be Celtic virtues? And why should we not seek for the cause of their absence in something else than the idle pretext of "Celtic blood?"

I have been unable to meet with any answers to these questions.

V. _The Celtic and the Teutonic dialects are members of the same great Aryan family of languages; but there is evidence to show that a non-Aryan language was at one time spoken over a large extent of the area occupied by Melanochroi in Europe_.

The non-Aryan language here referred to is the Euskarian, now spoken only by the Basques, but which seems in earlier times to have been the language of the Aquitanians and Spaniards, and may possibly have extended much further to the East. Whether it has any connection with the Ligurian and Oscan dialects are questions upon which, of course, I do not presume to offer any opinion. But it is important to remark that it is a language the area of which has gradually diminished without any corresponding extirpation of the people who primitively spoke it; so that the people of Spain and of Aquitaine at the present day must be largely "Euskarian" by descent in just the same sense as the Cornish men are "Celtic" by descent.

Such seem to me to be the main facts respecting the ethnology of the British islands and of Western Europe, which may be said to be fairly established. The hypothesis by which I think (with De Belloguet and Thurnam) the facts may best be explained is this: In very remote times Western Europe and the British islands were inhabited by the dark stock, or the Melanochroi, alone, and these Melanochroi spoke dialects allied to the Euskarian. The Xanthochroi, spreading over the great Eurasiatic plains westward, and speaking Aryan dialects, gradually invaded the territories of the Melanochroi. The Xanthochroi, who thus came into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a Celtic language; and that Celtic language, whether Cymric or Gaelic, spread over the Melanochroi far beyond the limits of intermixture of blood, supplanting Euskarian, just as English and French, have supplanted Celtic. Even as early as Caesar's time, I suppose that the Euskarian was everywhere, except in Spain and in Aquitaine, replaced by Celtic, and thus the Celtic speakers were no longer of one ethnological stock, but of two. Both in Western Europe and in England a third wave of language--in the one case Latin, in the other Teutonic--has spread over the same area. In Western Europe, it has left a fragment of the primary Euskarian in one corner of the country, and a fragment of the secondary Celtic in another. In the British islands, only outlying pools of the secondary linguistic wave remain in Wales, the Highlands, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. If this hypothesis is a sound one, it follows that the name of Celtic is not properly applicable to the Melanochroic or dark stock of Europe. They are merely, so to speak, secondary Celts. The primary and aboriginal Celtic-speaking people are Xanthochroi--the typical Gauls of the ancient writers, and the close allies by blood, customs, and language, of the Germans.

IX.

PALAEONTOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

(THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS TO THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, FOR 1870.)

It is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard Homer, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address. I availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to "take stock" of that portion of the science of biology which is commonly called "palaeontology," as it then existed; and, discussing one after another the doctrines held by palaeontologists, I put before you the results of my attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or the doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those results were:--

1. The living population of all parts of the earth's surface which have yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes which, upon the whole, have been of a slow and gradual character.

2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these successive changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less distant parts of the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit a certain broad and general parallelism. In other words, certain forms of life in one locality occur in the same general order of succession as, or are _homotaxial_ with, similar forms in the other locality.

3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism without independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even identical, faunae and florae in two different localities may be of extremely different ages, if the term "age" is used in its proper chronological sense. I stated that "geographical provinces, or zones, may have been as distinctly marked in the Palaeozoic epoch as at present; and those seemingly sudden appearances of new genera and species, which we ascribe to new creation, may be simple results of migration."

4. The opinion that the oldest known fossils are the earliest forms of life has no solid foundation.

5. If we confine ourselves to positively ascertained facts, the total amount of change in the forms of animal and vegetable life, since the existence of such forms is recorded, is small. When compared with the lapse of time since the first appearance of these forms, the amount of change is wonderfully small. Moreover, in each great group of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, there are certain forms which I termed PERSISTENT TYPES, which have remained, with but very little apparent change, from their first appearance to the present time.

6. In answer to the question "What, then, does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of palaeontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose that modification to have taken place by a necessary progress from more to less embryonic forms, from more to less generalized types, within, the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous rocks?" I reply, "It negatives these doctrines; for it either shows us no evidence of such modification, or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight; and, as to the nature of that modification, it yields no evidence whatsoever that the earlier members of any long-continued group were more generalized in structure than the later ones."

I think that I cannot employ my last opportunity of addressing you, officially, more properly--I may say more dutifully--than in revising these old judgments with such help as further knowledge and reflection, and an extreme desire to get at the truth, may afford me.

1. With respect to the first proposition, I may remark that whatever may be the case among the physical geologists, catastrophic palaeontologists are practically extinct. It is now no part of recognized geological doctrine that the species of one formation all died out and were replaced by a brand-new set in the next formation. On the contrary, it is generally, if not universally, agreed that the succession of life has been, the result of a slow and gradual replacement of species by species; and that all appearances of abruptness of change are due to breaks in the series of deposits, or other changes in physical conditions. The continuity of living forms has been unbroken from the earliest times to the present day.

2, 3. The use of the word "homotaxis" instead of "synchronism" has not, so far as I know, found much favour in the eyes of geologists. I hope, therefore, that it is a love for scientific caution, and not mere personal affection for a bantling of my own, which leads me still to think that the change of phrase is of importance, and that the sooner it is made, the sooner shall we get rid of a number of pitfalls which beset the reasoner upon the facts and theories of geology.

One of the latest pieces of foreign intelligence which has reached us is the information that the Austrian geologists have, at last, succumbed to the weighty evidence which M. Barrande has accumulated, and have admitted the doctrine of colonies. But the admission of the doctrine of colonies implies the further admission that even identity of organic remains is no proof of the synchronism of the deposits which contain them.

4. The discussions touching the _Eozoon_, which commenced in 1864, have abundantly justified the fourth proposition. In 1862, the oldest record of life was in the Cambrian rocks; but if the _Eozoon_ be, as Principal Dawson and Dr. Carpenter have shown so much reason for believing, the remains of a living being, the discovery of its true nature carried life back to a period which, as Sir William Logan has observed, is as remote from that during which the Cambrian rocks were deposited, as the Cambrian epoch itself is from the tertiaries. In other words, the ascertained duration of life upon the globe was nearly doubled at a stroke.

5. The significance of persistent types, and of the small amount of change which has taken place even in those forms which can be shown to have been modified, becomes greater and greater in my eyes, the longer I occupy myself with the biology of the past.

Consider how long a time has elapsed since the Miocene epoch. Yet, at that time, there is reason to believe that every important group in every order of the _Mammalia_ was represented. Even the comparatively scanty Eocene fauna yields examples of the orders _Cheiroptera, Insectivora, Rodentia_, and _Perissodactyla_; of _Artiodactyla_ under both the Ruminant and the Porcine modifications; of _Carnivora, Cetacea_, and _Marsupialia_.

Or, if we go back to the older half of the Mesozoic epoch, how truly surprising it is to find every order of the _Reptilia_, except the _Ophidia_, represented; while some groups, such as the _Ornithoscelida_ and the _Pterosauria_, more specialized than any which now exist, abounded.

There is one division of the _Amphibia_ which offers especially important evidence upon this point, inasmuch as it bridges over the gap between the Mesozoic and the Palaeozoic formations (often supposed to be of such prodigious magnitude), extending, as it does, from the bottom of the Carboniferous series to the top of the Trias, if not into the Lias. I refer to the Labyrinthodonts. As the address of 1862 was passing through the press, I was able to mention, in a note, the discovery of a large Labyrinthodont, with well-ossified vertebrae, in the Edinburgh coal-field. Since that time eight or ten distinct genera of Labyrinthodonts have been discovered in the Carboniferous rocks of England, Scotland, and Ireland, not to mention the American forms described by Principal Dawson and Professor Cope. So that, at the present time, the Labyrinthodont Fauna of the Carboniferous rocks is more extensive and diversified than that of the Trias, while its chief types, so far as osteology enables us to judge, are quite as highly organized. Thus it is certain that a comparatively highly organized vertebrate type, such as that of the Labyrinthodonts, is capable of persisting, with no considerable change, through the period represented by the vast deposits which constitute the Carboniferous, the Permian, and the Triassic formations.

The very remarkable results which have been brought to light by the sounding and dredging operations, which have been carried on with such remarkable success by the expeditions sent out by our own, the American, and the Swedish Governments, under the supervision of able naturalists, have a bearing in the same direction. These investigations have demonstrated the existence, at great depths in the ocean, of living animals in some cases identical with, in others very similar to, those which are found fossilized in the white chalk. The _Globigerinae_, Cyatholiths, Coccospheres, Discoliths in the one are absolutely identical with those in the other; there are identical, or closely analogous, species of Sponges, Echinoderms, and Brachiopods. Off the coast of Portugal, there now lives a species of _Beryx_, which, doubtless, leaves its bones and scales here and there in the Atlantic ooze, as its predecessor left its spoils in the mud of the sea of the Cretaceous epoch.

Many years ago[1] I ventured to speak of the Atlantic mud as "modern chalk," and I know of no fact inconsistent with the view which Professor Wyville Thomson has advocated, that the modern chalk is not only the lineal descendant of the ancient chalk, but that it remains, so to speak, in the possession of the ancestral estate; and that from the Cretaceous period (if not much earlier) to the present day, the deep sea has covered a large part of what is now the area of the Atlantic. But if _Globigerinae_, and _Terebratula caput-serpentis_ and _Beryx_, not to mention other forms of animals and of plants, thus bridge over the interval between the present and the Mesozoic periods, is it possible that the majority of other living things underwent a "sea-change into something new and strange" all at once?

[Footnote 1: See an article in the _Saturday Review_, for 1858, on "Chalk, Ancient and Modern."]

6. Thus far I have endeavoured to expand and to enforce by fresh arguments, but not to modify in any important respect, the ideas submitted to you on a former occasion. But when I come to the propositions touching progressive modification, it appears to me, with the help of the new light which has broken from various quarters, that there is much ground for softening the somewhat Brutus-like severity with which, in 1862, I dealt with a doctrine, for the truth of which I should have been glad enough to be able to find a good foundation. So far, indeed, as the _Invertebrata_, and the lower _Vertebrata_ are concerned, the facts and the conclusions which are to be drawn from them appear to me to remain what they were. For anything that, as yet, appears to the contrary, the earliest known Marsupials may have been as highly organized as their living congeners; the Permian lizards show no signs of inferiority to those of the present day; the Labyrinthodonts cannot be placed below the living Salamander and Triton; the Devonian Ganoids are closely related to _Polypterus_ and to _Lepidosiren_.

But when we turn to the higher _Vertebrata_, the results of recent investigations, however we may sift and criticise them, seem to me to leave a clear balance in favour of the doctrine of the evolution of living forms one from another. Nevertheless, in discussing this question, it is very necessary to discriminate carefully between the different kinds of evidence from fossil remains which are brought forward in favour of evolution.

Every fossil which takes an intermediate place between forms of life already known, may be said, so far as it is intermediate, to be evidence in favour of evolution, inasmuch as it shows a possible road by which evolution may have taken place. But the mere discovery of such a form does not, in itself, prove that evolution took place by and through it, nor does it constitute more than presumptive evidence in favour of evolution in general. Suppose A, B, C to be three forms, while B is intermediate in structure between A and C. Then the doctrine of evolution offers four possible alternatives. A may have become C by way of B; or C may have become A by way of B; or A and C may be independent modifications of B; or A, B, and C may be independent modifications of some unknown D. Take the case of the Pigs, the _Anoplotheridae_, and the Ruminants. The _Anoplotheridae_ are intermediate between the first and the last; but this does not tell us whether the Ruminants have come from the Pigs, or the Pigs from Ruminants, or both from _Anoplotheridae_, or whether Pigs, Ruminants, and _Anoplotheridae_ alike may not have diverged from some common stock.

But if it can be shown that A, B, and C exhibit successive stages in the degree of modification, or specialization, of the same type; and if, further, it can be proved that they occur in successively newer deposits. A being in the oldest and C in the newest, then the intermediate character of B has quite another importance, and I should accept it, without hesitation, as a link in the genealogy of C. I should consider the burden of proof to be thrown upon anyone who denied C to have been derived from A by way of B, or in some closely analogous fashion; for it is always probable that one may not hit upon the exact line of filiation, and, in dealing with fossils, may mistake uncles and nephews for fathers and sons.

I think it necessary to distinguish between the former and the latter classes of intermediate forms, as _intercalary types_ and _linear types_. When I apply the former term, I merely mean to say that as a matter of fact, the form B, so named, is intermediate between the others, in the sense in which the _Anoplotherium_ is intermediate between the Pigs and the Ruminants--without either affirming, or denying, any direct genetic relation between the three forms involved. When I apply the latter term, on the other hand, I mean to express the opinion that the forms A, B, and C constitute a line of descent, and that B is thus part of the lineage of C.

From the time when Cuvier's wonderful researches upon the extinct Mammals of the Paris gypsum first made intercalary types known, and caused them to be recognized as such, the number of such forms has steadily increased among the higher _Mammalia_. Not only do we now know numerous intercalary forms of _Ungulata_, but M. Gaudry's great monograph upon the fossils of Pikermi (which strikes me as one of the most perfect pieces of palaeontological work I have seen for a long time) shows us, among the _Primates, Mesopithecus_ as an intercalary form between the _Semnopitheci_ and the _Macaci_; and among the _Carnivora, Hyaenictis_ and _Ictitherium_ as intercalary, or, perhaps, linear types between the _Viverridae_ and the _Hyaenidae_.

Hardly any order of the higher _Mammalia_ stands so apparently separate and isolated from the rest as that of the _Cetacea_; though a careful consideration of the structure of the pinnipede _Carnivora_, or Seals, shows, in them, many an approximation towards the still more completely marine mammals. The extinct _Zeuglodon_, however, presents us with an intercalary form between the type of the Seals and that of the Whales. The skull of this great Eocene sea-monster, in fact, shows by the narrow and prolonged interorbital region; the extensive union of the parietal bones in a sagittal suture; the well-developed nasal bones; the distinct and large incisors implanted in premaxillary bones, which take a full share in bounding the fore part of the gape; the two-fanged molar teeth with triangular and serrated crowns, not exceeding five on each side in each jaw; and the existence of a deciduous dentition--its close relation with the Seals. While, on the other hand, the produced rostral form of the snout, the long symphysis, and the low coronary process of the mandible are approximations to the cetacean form of those parts.

The scapula resembles that of the cetacean _Hyperoodon_, but the supra-spinous fossa is larger and more seal-like; as is the humerus, which differs from that of the _Cetacea_ in presenting true articular surfaces for the free jointing of the bones of the fore-arm. In the apparently complete absence of hinder limbs, and in the characters of the vertebral column, the _Zeuglodon_ lies on the cetacean side of the boundary line; so that, upon the whole, the Zeuglodonts, transitional as they are, are conveniently retained in the cetacean order. And the publication, in 1864, of M. Van Beneden's memoir on the Miocene and Pliocene _Squalodon_, furnished much better means than anatomists previously possessed of fitting in another link of the chain which connects the existing _Cetacea_ with _Zeuglodon_. The teeth are much more numerous, although the molars exhibit the zeuglodont double fang; the nasal bones are very short, and the upper surface of the rostrum presents the groove, filled up during life by the prolongation of the ethmoidal cartilage, which is so characteristic of the majority of the _Cetacea_.

It appears to me that, just as among the existing _Carnivora_, the walruses and the eared seals are intercalary forms between the fissipede Carnivora and the ordinary seals, so the Zeuglodonts are intercalary between the _Carnivora_, as a whole, and the _Cetacea_. Whether the Zeuglodonts are also linear types in their relation to these two groups cannot be ascertained, until we have more definite knowledge than we possess at present, respecting the relations in time of the _Carnivora_ and _Cetacea_.

Thus far we have been concerned with the intercalary types which occupy the intervals between Families or Orders of the same class; but the investigations which have been carried on by Professor Gegenbaur, Professor Cope, and myself into the structure and relations of the extinct reptilian forms of the _Ornithoscelida_ (or _Dinosauria_ and _Compsognatha_) have brought to light the existence of intercalary forms between what have hitherto been always regarded as very distinct classes of the vertebrate sub-kingdom, namely _Reptilia_ and _Aves_. Whatever inferences may, or may not, be drawn from the fact, it is now an established truth that, in many of these _Ornithoscelida_, the hind limbs and the pelvis are much more similar to those of Birds than they are to those of Reptiles, and that these Bird-reptiles, or Reptile-birds, were more or less completely bipedal.

When I addressed you in 1862, I should have been bold indeed had I suggested that palaeontology would before long show us the possibility of a direct transition from the type of the lizard to that of the ostrich. At the present moment we have, in the _Ornithoscelida_, the intercalary type, which proves that transition to be something more than a possibility; but it is very doubtful whether any of the genera of _Ornithoscelida_ with which we are at present acquainted are the actual linear types by which the transition from the lizard to the bird was effected. These, very probably, are still hidden from us in the older formations.

Let us now endeavour to find some cases of true linear types, or forms which are intermediate between others because they stand in a direct genetic relation to them. It is no easy matter to find clear and unmistakable evidence of filiation among fossil animals; for, in order that such evidence should be quite satisfactory, it is necessary that we should be acquainted with all the most important features of the organization of the animals which are supposed to be thus related, and not merely with the fragments upon which the genera and species of the palaeontologist are so often based. M. Gaudry has arranged the species of _Hyaenidae, Proboscidea, Rhinocerotidae_, and _Equidae_ in their order of filiation from their earliest appearance in the Miocene epoch to the present time, and Professor Rütimeyer has drawn up similar schemes for the Oxen and other _Ungulata_--with what, I am disposed to think, is a fair and probable approximation to the order of nature. But, as no one is better aware than these two learned, acute, and philosophical biologists, all such arrangements must be regarded as provisional, except in those cases in which, by a fortunate accident, large series of remains are obtainable from a thick and wide-spread series of deposits. It is easy to accumulate probabilities--hard to make out some particular case in such a way that it will stand rigorous criticism.

After much search, however, I think that such a case is to be made out in favour of the pedigree of the Horses.

The genus _Equus_ is represented as far back as the latter part of the Miocene epoch; but in deposits belonging to the middle of that epoch its place is taken by two other genera, _Hipparion_ and _Anchitherium_[1]; and, in the lowest Miocene and upper Eocene, only the last genus occurs. A species of _Anchitherium_ was referred by Cuvier to the _Palaeotheria_ under the name of _P. aurelianense_. The grinding-teeth are in fact very similar in shape and in pattern, and in the absence of any thick layer of cement, to those of some species of _Palaeotherium_, especially Cuvier's _Palaeotherium minus_, which has been formed into a separate genus, _Plagiolophus_, by Pomel. But in the fact that there are only six full-sized grinders in the lower jaw, the first premolar being very small; that the anterior grinders are as large as, or rather larger than, the posterior ones; that the second premolar has an anterior prolongation; and that the posterior molar of the lower jaw has, as Cuvier pointed out, a posterior lobe of much smaller size and different form, the dentition of _Anchitherium_ departs from the type of the _Palaeotherium_, and approaches that of the Horse.

[Footnote 1: Hermann von Meyer gave the name of _Anchitherium_ to _A. Ezguerrae_; and in his paper on the subject he takes great pains to distinguish the latter as the type of a new genus, from Cuvier's _Palaeotherium d'Orléans._ But it is precisely the _Palaeotherium d'Orléans_ which is the type of Christol's genus _Hipparitherium_; and thus, though _Hipparitherium_ is of later date than _Anchitherium_, it seemed to me to have a sort of equitable right to recognition when this address was written. On the whole, however, it seems most convenient to adopt _Anchitherium_.]

Again, the skeleton of _Anchitherium_ is extremely equine. M. Christol goes so far as to say that the description of the bones of the horse, or the ass, current in veterinary works, would fit those of _Anchitherium._ And, in a general way, this may be true enough; but there are some most important differences, which, indeed, are justly indicated by the same careful observer. Thus the ulna is complete throughout, and its shaft is not a mere rudiment, fused into one bone with the radius. There are three toes, one large in the middle and one small on each side. The femur is quite like that of a horse, and has the characteristic fossa above the external condyle. In the British Museum there is a most instructive specimen of the leg-bones, showing that the fibula was represented by the external malleolus and by a flat tongue of bone, which extends up from it on the outer side of the tibia, and is closely ankylosed with the latter bone.[1] The hind toes are three, like those of the fore leg; and the middle metatarsal bone is much less compressed from side to side than that of the horse.

[Footnote 1: I am indebted to M. Gervais for a specimen which indicates that the fibula was complete, at any rate, in some cases; and for a very interesting ramus of a mandible, which shows that, as in the _Palaeotheria_, the hindermost milk-molar of the lower jaw was devoid of the posterior lobe which exists in the hindermost true molar.]

In the _Hipparion_ the teeth nearly resemble those of the Horses, though the crowns of the grinders are not so long; like those of the Horses, they are abundantly coated with cement. The shaft of the ulna is reduced to a mere style ankylosed throughout nearly its whole length with the radius, and appearing to be little more than a ridge on the surface of the latter bone until it is carefully examined. The front toes are still three, but the outer ones are more slender than in _Anchitherium_, and their hoofs smaller in proportion to that of the middle toe: they are, in fact, reduced to mere dew-claws, and do not touch the ground. In the leg, the distal end of the fibula is so completely united with the tibia that it appears to be a mere process of the latter bone, as in the Horses.

In _Equus_, finally, the crowns of the grinding-teeth become longer, and their patterns are slightly modified; the middle of the shaft of the ulna usually vanishes, and its proximal and distal ends ankylose with the radius. The phalanges of the two outer toes in each foot disappear, their metacarpal and metatarsal bones being left as the "splints."

The _Hipparion_ has large depressions on the face in front of the orbits, like those for the "larmiers" of many ruminants; but traces of these are to be seen in some of the fossil horses from the Sewalik Hills; and, as Leidy's recent researches show, they are preserved in _Anchitherium_.

When we consider these facts, and the further circumstance that the Hipparions, the remains of which have been collected in immense numbers, were subject, as M. Gaudry and others have pointed out, to a great range of variation, it appears to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the types of the _Anchitherium_, of the _Hipparion_, and of the ancient Horses constitute the lineage of the modern Horses, the _Hipparion_ being the intermediate stage between the other two, and answering; to B in my former illustration.

The process by which the _Anchitherium_ has been converted into _Equus_ is one of specialization, or of more and more complete deviation from what might be called the average form of an ungulate mammal. In the Horses, the reduction of some parts of the limbs, together with the special modification of those which are left, is carried to a greater extent than in any other hoofed mammals. The reduction is less and the specialization is less in the _Hipparion_, and still less in the _Anchitherium_; but yet, as compared with other mammals, the reduction and specialization of parts in the _Anchitherium_ remain great.

Is it not probable then, that, just as in the Miocene epoch, we find an ancestral equine form less modified than _Equus_, so, if we go back to the Eocene epoch, we shall find some quadruped related to the _Anchitherium_, as _Hipparion_ is related to _Equus_, and consequently departing less from the average form?