Proteus or unity in nature.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Proteus or unity in nature. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    221/232 (page 213)
    the more simple plants and animals reach deeper down than the less simple. But, in fact, these forms, plant and animal, more simple and less simple, extinct and non- extinct, are mixed together—for example, the conifers and cycadaceae with the algae, the crustaceans and brach- iopods and annelids and cephalopods with the sponges and polypes—in such a way as to make it more than difficult to believe that the more simple had prece- dence of the less simple in the order of development. Indeed, I do not see why the plants and animals may not represent the spoils of different districts at the same time rather than those of any one district at different times—why the plants and animals of different districts should not have differed as they differ now, say in Australia and India, and why, for this reason, the rocks formed from the debris of these districts should not differ in their fossil remains as much as they do in their inorganic constituents, and this all the more as the difference in their inorganic constituents would seem to point con- clusively to difference of district. And, most assuredly, many difficulties will have to be cleared away before it is possible to follow the latest and most uncompromising of the evolutionists, Professor Hackel, in the path along which, by dint of much pushing and leaping, through many intermediate forms, many of them purely ima- ginary, he tries to make his way from the monera to man—a path of which the following brief and pithy itine- rary, given by my friend Dr. Elam in a remarkably interesting work just published *, is not a gloss or caricature, as it may seem to be, but a simple abstract of the text. Thus :— 1. The Monera is the earliest * Winds of Doctrine: an Examination of the Modern Theories of Automatism and Evolution. P