[12] Zittel, "History," p. 110. It should be noted that all these rocks in England thus examined by Smith make up only a small fraction of the total geological series--largely what we now call the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks. CHAPTER III FACT NUMBER ONE Hitherto we have been dealing only with the _a priori_ aspects of the succession of life idea. We have seen that it is really based on two primary assumptions, viz.: (1) That over all the earth the fossils =must always occur= in the particular order in which they were found to occur in a few corners of Western Europe; and also-- (2) That in the long ago =there were no such things as zoological provinces and zones=, and totally different types of fossils from separated localities could not possibly have been contemporaneous with one another as we know they are to-day in "recent" deposits.[13] On the blending of these two assumptions, the latter essentially absurd, and the former long ago disproved by the facts of the rocks, has been built up the towering structure of a complete "phylogenic series" from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene. The way in which, as we have been, Spencer and Huxley treated this subject, reminds us very much of the old advice, "When you meet with an insuperable difficulty, look it steadfastly in the face--and pass on." For neither they nor any of their thousands of followers have ever, so far as I know, pointed out the horrible logic in taking this immense complex of guesses and assumptions as the starting-point for new departures, the solid foundation for detailed "investigations" as to =just how= this wonderful phenomenon of development has occurred. For after Agassiz and his contemporaries had built on these large assumptions of Cuvier, and had arranged the details and the exact order of these successive forms by comparison with the embryonic life of the modern individual, the evolutionists of our time, led by such men as Spencer and Haeckel, with their "philogenetic principle," =prove= their theory of evolution by showing that the embryonic life of the individual is only "a brief recapitulation, as it were from memory," of the geological succession in time. There would really seem to be little hope of reaching with any arguments a generation of scientists who can elaborate genealogical trees of descent for the different families and genera of the animal kingdom, based wholly on such a series of assumptions and blind guesses, and then palm off their work on a credulous world as the proved results of =inductive= science.