To which the reply is:  “If there is one fact which is impressed on the conviction of the observer with more force than any other, it is the persistence and uniformity of the characters of the molar teeth in the earliest known mammoth and his most modern successor . . .  Assuming the observation to be correct, what strong proof does it not afford of the persistence and constancy, throughout vast intervals of time, of the distinctive characters of those organs which arc most concerned in the existence and habits of the species?  If we cast a glance back on the long vista of physical changes which our planet has undergone since the Neozoic epoch, we can nowhere detect signs of a revolution more sudden and pronounced, or more important in its results, than the intercalation and sudden disappearance of the glacial period.  Yet the ‘dicyclotherian’ mammoth lived before it, and passed through the ordeal of all the hard extremities it involved, bearing his organs of locomotion and digestion all but unchanged.  Taking the group of four European fossil species above enumerated, do they show any signs in the successive deposits of a transition from the one form into the other?  Here again the result of my observation, in so far as it has extended over the European area, is, that the specific characters of the molars are constant in each, within a moderate range of variation, and that we nowhere meet with intermediate forms.” . . .

Dr. Falconer continues (page 80): 

“The inferences which I draw from these facts are not opposed to one of the leading propositions of Darwin’s theory.  With him, I have no faith in the opinion that the mammoth and other extinct elephants made their appearance suddenly, after the type in which their fossil remains are presented to us.  The most rational view seems to be, that they are in some shape the modified descendants of earlier progenitors.  But if the asserted facts be correct, they seem clearly to indicate that the older elephants of Europe, such as E. meridionalis and E. antiguus, were not the stocks from which the later species, E. primigenius and E. Africanus sprung, and that we must look elsewhere for their origin.  The nearest affinity, and that a very close one, of the European E. meridionalis is with the Miocene E. planifrons of India; and of E. primigenius, with the existing India species.

“Another reflection is equally strong in my mind—­that the means which have been adduced to explain the origin of the species by ‘natural selection,’ or a process of variation from external influences, are inadequate to account for the phenomena.  The law of phyllotaxis, which governs the evolution of leaves around the axis of a plant, is as nearly constant in its manifestation as any of the physical laws connected with the material world.  Each instance, however different from another, can be shown to be a term of some series of continued fractions.  When this is coupled with the geometrical law governing