Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted
towards unity or multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would
depend on the age of the man who drifted.
Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid
fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had
sported when geological life was young; as though they had all
remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow
Castle, and repeat "how charming is divine philosophy!" He felt
almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of
Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and
far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis
as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for
him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life.
A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the
liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not
for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet
historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the
value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform
Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his
neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not
select -- evolution finished before it began -- minute changes
that refused to change anything during the whole geological
record - survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no
origin -- uniformity under conditions which had disturbed
everything else in creation -- to an honest-meaning though
ignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not
assume it, such sequence brought no peace.
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