Nothing could have been more useful to the opposition than this characteristically candid avowal, twisted as it immediately was into an admission that the writer's views were contradicted by the facts of palæontology. But, in fact, Mr. Darwin made no such admission. What he says in effect is, not that palæontological evidence is against him, but that it is not distinctly in his favour; and, without attempting to attenuate the fact, he accounts for it by the scantiness and the imperfection of that evidence. What is the state of the case now, when, as we have seen, the amount of our knowledge respecting the mammalia of the Tertiary epoch is increased fifty-fold, and in some directions even approaches completeness? Simply this, that, if the doctrine of evolution had not existed, palaeontologists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it forced upon the mind by the study of the remains of the Tertiary mammalia which have been brought to light since 1859. Among the fossils of Pikermi, Gaudry found the successive stages by which the ancient civets passed into the more modern hyænas; through the Tertiary deposits of Western America, Marsh tracked the successive forms by which the ancient stock of the horse has passed into its present form; and innumerable less complete indications of the mode of evolution of other groups of the higher mammalia have been obtained. In the remarkable memoir on the phosphorites of Quercy, to which I have referred, M. Filhol describes no fewer than seventeen varieties of the genus _Cynodictis_, which fill up all the interval between the viverine animals and the bear-like dog _Amphicyon_; nor do I know any solid ground of objection to the supposition that, in this _Cynodictis-Amphicyon_ group, we have the stock whence all the Viveridæ, Felidæ, Hyænidæ, Canidæ, and perhaps the Procyonidæ and Ursidæ, of the present fauna have been evolved. On the contrary, there is a great deal to be said in favour. In the course of summing up his results, M. Filhol observes:-- "During the epoch of the phosphorites, great changes took place in animal forms, and almost the same types as those which now exist became defined from one another. "Under the influence of natural conditions of which we have no exact knowledge, though traces of them are discoverable, species have been modified in a thousand ways: races have arisen which, becoming fixed, have thus produced a corresponding number of secondary species."