And in his Presidential address to the Linnean Society, May 24, 1902, Professor S. H. Vines thus expressed himself as to the genealogical table of organic life, which ever since the doctrine of Evolution was accepted, it has been sought to construct:
Though here and there fragments of the mosaic[{238}] seem to have been successfully pieced together, the main outlines, even, of the great picture are as yet but dimly discernible.
The fact that organic Evolution should have proceeded so far as it has within such limits of time as may reasonably be allowed, admits, to my mind, of no other interpretation than that variation is not indeterminate, but, as Lamarck and Nägeli have urged, there must exist in living matter a certain inherent tendency or bias in favour of variation in the higher direction. It is this tendency or bias that I venture to regard as the primordial factor.
But it is precisely such an inherent tendency of organic life to develop on predetermined lines, which Darwinians and other advocates of Evolution by the agency of physical forces alone, vehemently repudiate as fatal to their whole system.
[Since Professor Williamson wrote, the opinion has been adopted that for the very reason which induced him to place the Sharks above the Cycloids and Ctenoids, their relative positions should be reversed. The Sharks being a more "generalized" type, with features more akin to those of land-dwelling reptiles, and the others more "specialized" for purely aquatic conditions, the latter, it is argued, are a higher evolutionary product. As a necessary corollary it is assumed that vertebrate life originated, not, as had been supposed, in the sea, but in swamps or lagoons on the shore-line. It must, however, remain a question how far the facility with which theories can thus be modified according to requirements, is calculated to inspire confidence in them.]
XVII
"AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM"
WE have heard Mr. Carruthers' declaration, based upon his survey of palæontological botany, "The whole evidence is against Evolution, and there is none in favour of it."
Remarkably enough, at almost the same period[274] Professor Huxley concluded a discussion of palæontological evidence with a precisely contrary pronouncement—"The whole evidence is in favour of Evolution, and there is none against it." On other occasions, also, he distinctly maintained that it is just this line of enquiry which conclusively establishes Evolution as no longer a theory, but an historical fact. To such a conclusion, he tells us,[275] "an acute and critical-minded investigator is led by the facts of palæontology;"—and, again, "If the doctrine of Evolution had not existed, palæontologists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it forced upon the mind by the study of the remains of the Tertiary mammalia."