VIII. CREATION BY LAW.

to Mammals. (These have been recently shown by Professor Huxley to have more affinity to Birds.) It is manifested by the combination of modern crocodilian, chelonian, and lacertian characters in the Cryptodontia and the Dicnyodontia, and by the combined lacertian and crocodilian characters in the Thecodontia and Sauropterygia.” In the same work he tells us that, “the Anoplotherium, in several important characters resembled the embryo Ruminant, but retained throughout life those marks of adhesion to a generalized mammalian type;”—and assures us that he has “never omitted a proper opportunity for impressing the results of observations showing the more generalized structures of extinct as compared with the more specialized forms of recent animals.” Modern palæontologists have discovered hundreds of examples of these more generalized or ancestral types. In the time of Cuvier, the Ruminants and the Pachyderms were looked upon as two of the most distinct orders of animals; but it is now demonstrated that there once existed a variety of genera and species, connecting by almost imperceptible grades such widely different animals as the pig and the camel. Among living quadrupeds we can scarcely find a more isolated group than the genus Equus, comprising the horses, asses, and Zebras; but through many species of Paloplotherium, Hippotherium, and Hipparion, and numbers of extinct forms of Equus found in Europe, India, and America, an almost complete transition is established with the Eocene Anoplothorium and Paleotherium, which are also generalized or ancestral types of the Tapir and Rhinoceros. The recent researches of M. Gaudry in Greece have furnished much new evidence of the same character. In the Miocene beds of Pikermi he has discovered the group of the Simocyonidæ intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyænictis which connects the hyænas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe with the deer and antelopes.