h, across a bridge at Bering Strait, to continue their
evolution on the other hemisphere, becoming extinct in the land of their
nativity. The ape-man fossil found in the tertiary strata of the island
of Java in 1891 by the Dutch surgeon Dr. Eugene Dubois, and named
Pithecanthropus erectus, may have been a direct descendant of the
American tribe of primitive lemurs, though this is only a conjecture.

Not all the strange beasts which have left their remains in our "bad
lands" are represented by living descendants. The titanotheres, or
brontotheridae, for example, a gigantic tribe, offshoots of the
same stock which produced the horse and rhinoceros, represented the
culmination of a line of descent. They developed rapidly in a geological
sense, and flourished about the middle of the tertiary period; then,
to use Agassiz's phrase," time fought against them." The story of their
evolution has been worked out by Professors Leidy, Marsh, Cope, and H.
F. Osborne.

A recent bit of paleontological evidence bearing on the question of
the introduction of species is that presented by Dr. J. L. Wortman in
connection with the fossil lineage of the edentates. It was suggested by
Marsh, in 1877, that these creatures, whose modern representatives are
all South American, originated in North America long before the two
continents had any land connection. The stages of degeneration by which
these animals gradually lost the enamel from their teeth, coming finally
to the unique condition of their modern descendants of the sloth tribe,
are illustrated by strikingly graded specimens now preserved in the
American Museum of Natural History, as shown by Dr. Wortman.

All these and a multitude of other recent observations that cannot be
even outlined here tell the same story. With one accord paleontologists
of our time regard the question of the introduction of new species as
solved. As Professor Marsh has said, "to doubt evolution today is to
doubt science; and science is only another name for truth."

Thus the third great battle over the meaning of the fossil records has
come to a conclusion. Again there is a truce to controversy, and it may
seem to the casual observer that the present stand of the science of
fossils is final and impregnable. But does this really mean that a full
synopsis of the story of paleontology has been told? Or do we only await
the coming of the twentieth-century Lamarck or Darwin, who shall
attack the fortified knowledge