The third argument is essentially a display of Mr. Belloc’s inability
to understand the nature of the record of the rocks. I will assume
that he knows what “strata” are, but it is clear that he does not
understand that any uniform stratum indicates the maintenance of
uniform conditions while it was deposited and an absence of selective
stresses, and that when it gives place to another different stratum,
that signifies a change in conditions, not only in the conditions of
the place where the stratum is found, but in the supply of material. An
estuary sinks and gives place to marine sands, or fresh water brings
down river gravels which cover over an accumulation of shingle. Now if
he will think what would happen to-day under such circumstances, he
will realise that the fauna and flora of the stratum first considered
will drift away and that another fauna and flora will come in with
the new conditions. Fresh things will come to feed and wade and drown
in the waters, and old types will no longer frequent them. The fossil
remains of one stratum are very rarely directly successive to those
below it or directly ancestral to those above it. A succession of
forms is much more difficult and elusive to follow up, therefore,
than Mr. Belloc imagines. And then if he will consider what happens to
the rabbits and rats and mice on his Sussex estate, and how they die
and what happens to their bodies, he may begin to realise just what
proportion of the remains of these creatures is ever likely to find its
way to fossilisation. Perhaps years pass without the bones of a single
rabbit from the whole of England finding their way to a resting-place
where they may become fossil. Nevertheless the rabbit is a very common
animal. And then if Mr. Belloc will think of palæontologists, millions
of years after this time, working at the strata that we are forming
to-day, working at a gravel or sand-pit here or a chance exposure
there, and prevented from any general excavation, and if he will ask
himself what proportion of the rare few rabbits actually fossilised are
likely to come to light, I think he will begin to realise for the first
time in his life the tremendous “gappiness” of the geological record
and how very childish and absurd is his demand for an unbroken series
of forms. The geological record is not like an array of hundreds of
volumes containing a complete history of the past. It is much more like
a few score crumpled pages from such an array, the rest of the volumes
having either never been printed, or having been destroyed or being
inaccessible.
In his Third Argument from Evidence Mr. Belloc obliges us with a
summary of this record of the rocks, about which he knows so little.
I need scarcely note here that the only evidence adduced is his own
inspired conviction. No “European” palæontologist or biologist is
brought out of the Humbert safe and quoted. Here was a chance to puzzle
me dreadfully with something “in French,” and it is scandalously thrown
away. Mr. Belloc tells us, just out of his head, that instead of there
being that succession of forms in the geological record the Theory
of Natural Selection requires, there are “enormously long periods of
stable type” and “(presumably) rapid periods of transition.” That
“presumably” is splendid; scientific caution and all the rest of
it--rapid periods when I suppose the Creative Spirit got busy and types
woke up and said, “Turn over; let’s change a bit.”
There is really nothing to be said about this magnificent
generalisation except that it is pure Bellocking. Wherever there is a
group of strata, sufficiently thick and sufficiently alike to witness
to a long-sustained period of slight alterations in conditions, there
we find the successive species approximating. This is not a statement à
la Belloc. In spite of the chances against such a thing occurring, and
in defiance of Mr. Belloc’s assertion that it does not occur, there are
several series of forms in time, giving a practically direct succession
of species. Mr. Belloc may read about it and at the same time exercise
this abnormal linguistic gift which sits upon him so gracefully, his
knowledge of the French language, in Deperet’s _Transformations du
Monde Animal_, where all these questions are conveniently summarised.
There he will get the results of Waagen with a succession of Ammonites
and also of Neumayr with _Paludina_, and there also he will get
information about the sequence of the species of _Mastodon_ throughout
the Tertiary age and read about the orderly progress of a pig group,
the _Brachyodus_ of the Eocene and Oligocene. There is a touch of irony
in the fact that his own special protégé, the Pig, should thus turn
upon him and rend his Third Argument from Evidence.
More recondite for Mr. Belloc is the work of Hilgendorf upon
_Planorbis_, because it is in German; but the drift of it is visible
in the Palæontology wing of the London Natural History Museum, Room
VIII. A species of these gasteropods was, during the slow processes of
secular change, caught in a big lake, fed by hot springs. It underwent
progressive modification into a series of successive new species as
conditions changed through the ages. Dr. Klähms’ specimens show this
beautifully. Rowe’s account of the evolutionary series in the genus
_Micraster_ (_Q.J.M.S._, 1899) is also accessible to Mr. Belloc, and
he will find other matter to ponder in Goodrich’s _Living Organisms_,
1924. The finest series of all, longer in range and completer in its
links, is that of the Horse. There is an excellent little pamphlet by
Matthew and Chubb, well illustrated, _The Evolution of the Horse_,
published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, so
plain, so simple, so entirely and humiliatingly destructive of Mr.
Belloc’s nonsensical assertions, that I pray him to get it and read it
for the good of his really very unkempt and neglected soul.
Thus we observe that Mr. Belloc does not know the facts in this case
of Natural Selection, and that he argues very badly from such facts as
he misconceives. It is for the reader to decide which at the end is
more suitable as a laughing-stock--the Theory of Natural Selection or
Mr. Belloc. And having thus studied this great Catholic apologist as
an amateur biologist and arrived at the result, we will next go on to
consider what he has to say about the origins of mankind--and Original
Sin.