An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation"

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Excerpt: ...low forms in their class. That there is thus a progress of some kind, the most superficial glance at the geological history is sufficient to convince us." Now this appears plausible and conclusive, but the correctness of the recapitulation here made, and its conformity to actual nature, have been sharply disputed. It may be true that sea plants came first, but of this there is no proof; and of land plants there is not a shadow of evidence that the simpler forms came into being before the more complex: the simple and complex forms are found together in the more ancient flora. It is true that we first see polypiaria, crinoidea, articulata, and mollusca, but not exactly in the order stated by the author. It is true that the next step gives us fishes, but it is not true that the earliest fishes link on to the lower sub-kingdom, the articulata. It is true that we afterwards find reptiles, but those which first appear belong to the highest order of the class, and show no links of an insensible gradation into fishes. In the tertiary deposit of the London clay the evidence of concatenation entirely fails. Among the millions of organic forms, from corals up to mammalia of the London and Paris basins, hardly a single secondary species is found. In the south of France it is said that two or three secondary species struggle into the tertiary strata; but they form a rare and evanescent exception to the general rule. Organic nature at this stage seems formed on a new pattern-plants as well as animals are changed. It might seem as if we had been transported to a new planet; for neither in the arrangement of the genera and the species, nor in their affinities with the types of a pre-existing world, is there any approach to a connected chain of organic development. For some discrepancies the author endeavours to account, and it is fair to give his explanation:- "Fossil history has no doubt still some obscure passages; and these have been partially adverted to....