Mr. Belloc’s next Argument from Evidence is a demand from the geologist
for a continuous “series of changing forms passing one into the other.”
He does not want merely “intermediate forms,” he says; he wants the
whole series--grandfather, father, and son. He does not say whether
he insists upon a pedigree with the bones and proper certificates of
birth, but I suppose it comes to that. This argument, I am afraid,
wins, hands down. Mr. Belloc may score the point. The reprehensible
negligence displayed by the lower animals in the burial of their dead,
or even the proper dating of their own remains, leaves the apologist
for the Theory of Natural Selection helpless before this simple
requisition. It is true that we now have, in the case of the camels,
the horses, and the elephants, an extraordinary display of fossil
types, exhibiting step by step the development and differentiation of
species and genera. But this, I take it, rather concerns his Third than
his Second Argument from Evidence.