In his Third Argument from Evidence Mr. Belloc obliges us with a summary of this record of the rocks, about which he knows so little. I need scarcely note here that the only evidence adduced is his own inspired conviction. No “European” palæontologist or biologist is brought out of the Humbert safe and quoted. Here was a chance to puzzle me dreadfully with something “in French,” and it is scandalously thrown away. Mr. Belloc tells us, just out of his head, that instead of there being that succession of forms in the geological record the Theory of Natural Selection requires, there are “enormously long periods of stable type” and “(presumably) rapid periods of transition.” That “presumably” is splendid; scientific caution and all the rest of it--rapid periods when I suppose the Creative Spirit got busy and types woke up and said, “Turn over; let’s change a bit.” There is really nothing to be said about this magnificent generalisation except that it is pure Bellocking. Wherever there is a group of strata, sufficiently thick and sufficiently alike to witness to a long-sustained period of slight alterations in conditions, there we find the successive species approximating. This is not a statement à la Belloc. In spite of the chances against such a thing occurring, and in defiance of Mr. Belloc’s assertion that it does not occur, there are several series of forms in time, giving a practically direct succession of species. Mr. Belloc may read about it and at the same time exercise this abnormal linguistic gift which sits upon him so gracefully, his knowledge of the French language, in Deperet’s _Transformations du Monde Animal_, where all these questions are conveniently summarised. There he will get the results of Waagen with a succession of Ammonites and also of Neumayr with _Paludina_, and there also he will get information about the sequence of the species of _Mastodon_ throughout the Tertiary age and read about the orderly progress of a pig group, the _Brachyodus_ of the Eocene and Oligocene. There is a touch of irony in the fact that his own special protégé, the Pig, should thus turn upon him and rend his Third Argument from Evidence.