2. There is no appearance of generalized forms among the earliest plants with which we are acquainted. For example, in the first dry land flora--the Devonian--we have representatives of the _Filices_, _Equisetaceæ_, and _Lycopodiaceæ_, all as highly specialized as their living representatives, and exhibiting the differential characters of these closely related groups. Moreover, these plants were even more highly organized than their existing descendants in regard to their vegetative structure, and in some cases also in regard to their reproductive organs. So likewise the Gymnosperms of that time show in their fossil state the same highly organized woody structure as their living representatives. 3. Similarly, and more generally, the Dicotyledonous plants, which first appear in the Cretaceous rocks, appear there suddenly, without any forms leading up to them--notwithstanding that "we know very well the extensive flora of the underlying Wealden." Moreover, we have all the three great divisions of the Dicotyledons appearing together, and so highly differentiated that all the species are referred to existing genera, with the exception of a very few imperfectly preserved, and therefore uncertain fragments. Such being the facts, we may begin by noticing that, even at first sight, they present different degrees of difficulty. Thus, I cannot see that there is much difficulty with regard to those in class 2. Only if we were to take the popular (and very erroneous) view of organic evolution as a process which is always and everywhere bound to promote the specialization of organic types--only then ought we to see any real difficulty in the absence of generalized types preceding these existing types. Of course we may wonder why still lower down in the geological series we do not meet with more generalized (or ancestral) types; but this is the difficulty number 3, which we now proceed to examine.