This kind of "Science" does not deserve to be treated seriously. It will be sufficient to cite another observation of M. de Quatrefages:[313]
If Darwin erred in regarding our very ignorance as to some degree telling in favour of his notions, he never tried to re-write the missing volumes of the earth's history, to restore the chapters which have been torn out, or to fill the blanks upon pages that have come down to us. But this is just what Haeckel does continually. Whenever a branch or a twig is lacking on his genealogical trees, whenever the transit from one type to another would appear too abrupt, were we to restrict ourselves to creatures actually known, he invents species and groups bodily, to which he unhesitatingly assigns a place in phylogeny, often a part in phylogenesis. Sometimes he calls in ontogeny to countenance the discovery of supposed ancestors: but frequently he does no more than affirm their existence. He thus creates a fauna, entirely hypothetical, of which Vogt rightly said that no man ever saw a trace of it, or ever will.
It is in this fashion that Professor Haeckel habitually solves the Riddles of the Universe.
As Vogt himself wrote,[314] "We shall be compelled to patch and alter these genealogical trees of species, which up to this time have been set forth as the last word of Science, and especially of Darwinism."
And Du Bois-Reymond,[315] "Man's pedigree, as drawn up by Haeckel, is worth about as much as is that of Homer's heroes for critical historians."
There remains to be considered Darwin's own explanation of the admitted deficiency of palæontological evidence.
The main cause [he writes][316] of innumerable intermediate links [between different forms] not now occurring everywhere throughout nature, depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and supplant their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
How imperfect this record is he proceeds to argue at length, and he has no difficulty in showing how much of it has at one time or other been defaced by natural causes, and how small a portion has been laid open to our inspection. But although his demonstration on this point is continually quoted, as though it solved the difficulty, it does not appear that it need detain us long.