So too, in the days when Mr. Darwin first took away the breath of scientific Europe by his startling theories, it used confidently to be said that geology had shown us no intermediate form between species and species. Even at the time when this assertion was originally made it was quite untenable. All early geological forms, of whatever race, belong to what we foolishly call 'generalised' types: that is to say, they present a mixture of features now found separately in several different animals. In other words, they represent early ancestors of all the modern forms, with peculiarities intermediate between those of their more highly differentiated descendants; and hence we ought to call them 'unspecialised' rather than 'generalised' types. For example, the earliest ancestral horse is partly a horse and partly a tapir: we may regard him as a _tertium quid_, a middle term, from which the horse has varied in one direction and the tapir in another, each of them exaggerating certain special peculiarities of the common ancestor and losing others, in accordance with the circumstances in which they have been placed. Science is now perpetually discovering intermediate forms, many of which compose an unbroken series between the unspecialised ancestral type and the familiar modern creatures. Thus, in this very case of the horse, Professor Marsh has unearthed a long line of fossil animals which lead in direct descent from the extremely unhorse-like eocene type to the developed Arab of our own times. Similarly with birds, Professor Huxley has shown that there is hardly any gap between the very bird-like lizards of the lias and the very lizard-like birds of the oolite. Such links, discovered afresh every day, are perpetual denials to the old parrot-like cry of 'No geological evidence for evolution.' VIII. _CUCKOO-PINT._ In the bank which supports the hedge, beside this little hanger on the flank of Black Down, the glossy arrow-headed leaves of the common arum form at this moment beautiful masses of vivid green foliage. 'Cuckoo-pint' is the pretty poetical old English name for the plant; but village children know it better by the equally quaint and fanciful title of 'lords and ladies.' The arum is not now in flower: it blossomed much earlier in the season, and its queer clustered fruits are just at present swelling out into rather shapeless little light-green bulbs, preparatory to assuming the bright coral-red hue which makes them so conspicuous among the hedgerows during the autumn months. A cut-and-dry technical botanist would therefore have little to say to it in its present stage, because he cares only for the flowers and seeds which help him in his dreary classifications, and give him so splendid an opportunity for displaying the treasures of his Latinised terminology. But to me the plant itself is the central point of interest, not the names (mostly in bad Greek) by which this or that local orchid-hunter has endeavoured to earn immortality.