A seventh anomaly of palæontological phylogeny is what may be described as contrariety of direction. We are asked to believe, for example, that in mammals racial development resulted in dimensional increase. The primitive ancestor of mammoths, mastodons, and elephants is alleged to have been the _Moeritherium_, “a small tapirlike form, from the Middle Eocene Qasr-el-Sagha beds of the Fayûm in Egypt.... _Moeritherium_ measured about 3½ feet in height.” (Lull: Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1908, pp. 655, 656.) The ancestor of the modern horse, we are told, was “a little animal less than a foot in height, known as _Eohippus_, from the rocks of the Eocene age.” (Woodruff: “Foundations of Biology,” p. 361.) In the case of insects, on the other hand, we are asked to believe the exact reverse, namely, that racial development brought about dimensional reduction. “In the middle of the Upper Carboniferous periods,” says Anton Handlirsch, “the forest swamps were populated with cockroaches about as long as a finger, dragonfly-like creatures with a wing spread of about 2½ feet, while insects that resemble our May flies were as big as a hand.” (“Die fossilen Insekten, und die Phylogenie der recenten Formen,” 1908, L. c., p. 1150.) Contrasting one of these giant palæozoic dragonflies, _Meganeura monyi_ Brongn., with the largest of modern dragonflies, _Aeschna grandis_ L., Chetverikov exclaims with reference to the latter: “What a pitiful pigmy it is and its specific name (_grandis_) sounds like such a mockery.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 446.) Chetverikov, it is true, proposes a teleological reason for this progressive diminution, but the fact remains that for dysteleological evolutionism, which dispenses with the postulate of a Providential coördination and regulation of natural agencies, this _diminuendo_ of the “evolving” insects stands in irreconcilable opposition to the _crescendo_ of the “evolving” mammals, and constitutes a difficulty which a purely mechanistic philosophy can never surmount.