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ACCORDING to a notice in NATURE, vol.ix. p. 228, a distinguished continental naturalist finds an important discordance between Darwinism and certain facts connected with Trilobites and other fossil crustaceans. But his argument appears to be based on an assumption that we are acquainted with a â primordial fauna,â that we are justified in dating the beginnings of life at or near some known geological period. This, however, the whole history of geology ought to make us less and less inclined to believe. It is one of those assumptions, essentially based on ignorance, on which so little dependence can rightly be placed. We have no right to call any fauna the earliest, merely because, as it happens, we know of none earlier. |
