successive strata are characterised by different kinds of fossil
remains, became a firmly established law of nature. No one has
set forth the speculative consequences of this generalisation
better than the historian of the 'Inductive Sciences':--

"But the study of geology opens to us the spectacle of many
groups of species which have, in the course of the earth's
history, succeeded each other at vast intervals of time; one set
of animals and plants disappearing, as it would seem, from the
face of our planet, and others, which did not before exist,
becoming the only occupants of the globe. And the dilemma then
presents itself to us anew:--either we must accept the doctrine
of the transmutation of species, and must suppose that the
organized species of one geological epoch were transmuted into
those of another by some long-continued agency of natural causes;
or else, we must believe in many successive acts of creation and
extinction of species, out of the common course of nature; acts
which, therefore, we may properly call miraculous." (Whewell's
'History of the Inductive Sciences.' Edition ii., 1847, volume
iii. pages 624-625. See for the author's verdict, pages 638-39.)

Dr. Whewell decides in favour of the latter conclusion. And if
any one had plied him with the four questions which he puts to
Lyell in the passage already cited, all that can be said now is
that he would certainly have rejected the first. But would he
really have had the courage to say that a Rhinoceros tichorhinus,
for instance, "was produced without parents;" or was "evolved
from some embryo substance;" or that it suddenly started from the
ground like Milton's lion "pawing to get free his hinder parts."
I permit myself to doubt whether even the Master of Trinity's