day have the original adult stages telescoped into
their embryos, and the statement that the resemblance between certain
characters in the embryos of higher animals and corresponding stages in the
embryos of lower animals is most plausibly explained by the assumption that
they have descended from the same ancestors, and that their common
structures are embryonic survivals.

_The Evidence from Paleontology_

The direct evidence furnished by fossil remains is by all odds the
strongest evidence that we have in favor of organic evolution. Paleontology
holds the incomparable position of being able to point directly to the
evidence showing that the animals and plants living in past times are
connected with those living at the present time, often through an unbroken
series of stages. Paleontology has triumphed over the weakness of the
evidence, which Darwin admitted was serious, by filling in many of the
missing links.

Paleontology has been criticised on the ground that she cannot pretend to
show the actual ancestors of living forms because, if in the past genera
and species were as abundant and as diverse as we find them at present, it
is very improbable that the bones of any individual that happened to be
preserved are the bones of just that species that took part in the
evolution. Paleontologists will freely admit that in many cases this is
probably true, but even then the evidence is, I think, still just as
valuable and in exactly the same sense as is the evidence from comparative
anatomy. It suffices to know that there lived in the past a particular
"group" of animals that had many points in common with those that preceded
them and with those that came later. Whether these are the actual ancestors
or not does not so much matter, for the view that from such a group of
species the later species have been derived is far more probable than any
other view that has been proposed.

With this unrivalled material and splendid series of gradations,
paleontology has constructed many stages in the past history of the globe.
But paleontologists have sometimes gone beyond this descriptive phase of
the subject and have attempted to formulate the "causes", "laws" and
"principles" that have led to the development of their series. It has even
been claimed that paleontologists are in an incomparably better position
than zoologists to discover such principles, because they know both the
beginning and the end of the evolutionary series. T