Mr. Belloc says he has not (“Argument from Evidence”). He says it very emphatically (“Crushing Argument from Evidence”--to adopt the phraseology of his cross-heads). Let me refer him to a recent lecture by Sir Arthur Keith (Royal Society of Medicine, Nov. 16, 1925) for a first gleam of enlightenment. He will realise a certain rashness in his statement. I will not fill these pages with an attempt to cover all the changes in the average man that have gone on in the last two or three thousand years. For example, in the face and skull, types with an edge-to-edge bite of the teeth are giving place to those with an overlapping bite; the palate is undergoing contraction, the physiognomy changes. And so on throughout all man’s structure. No doubt one can find plentiful instances to-day of people almost exactly like the people of five thousand years ago in their general physique. But that is not the point. The proportions and so forth that were exceptional then are becoming prevalent now; the proportions that were prevalent then, now become rare. The average type is changing. Considering that man only gets through about four generations in a century, it is a very impressive endorsement of the theory of Natural Selection that he has undergone these palpable modifications in the course of a brief score of centuries. Mr. Belloc’s delusion that no such modification has occurred may be due to his presumption that any modification would have to show equally in each and every individual. I think it is. He seems quite capable of presuming that. TRIUMPHANT DEMAND OF MR. BELLOC Mr. Belloc’s next Argument from Evidence is a demand from the geologist for a continuous “series of changing forms passing one into the other.” He does not want merely “intermediate forms,” he says; he wants the whole series--grandfather, father, and son. He does not say whether he insists upon a pedigree with the bones and proper certificates of birth, but I suppose it comes to that. This argument, I am afraid, wins, hands down. Mr. Belloc may score the point. The reprehensible negligence displayed by the lower animals in the burial of their dead, or even the proper dating of their own remains, leaves the apologist for the Theory of Natural Selection helpless before this simple requisition. It is true that we now have, in the case of the camels, the horses, and the elephants, an extraordinary display of fossil types, exhibiting step by step the development and differentiation of species and genera. But this, I take it, rather concerns his Third than his Second Argument from Evidence. A MAGNIFICENT GENERALISATION