Seite - 356 - in The Origin of Species

356 ORIGIN OF SPECIES not these birds their front limbs in this precise intermediate state of "neither true arms nor true wings" ? Yet these birds hold their place victoriously in the battle for life; for they exist in infinite numbers and of many kinds. I do not sup- pose that we here see the real transitional grades through which the wings of birds have passed; but what special diffi- culty is there in believing that it might profit the modified descendants of the penguin, first to become enabled to flap along the surface of the sea like the logger-headed duck, and ultimately to rise from its surface and glide through the air? I will now give a few examples to illustrate the foregoing remarks, and to show how liable we are to error in supposing that whole groups of species have suddenly been produced. Even in so short an interval as that between the first and second editions of Pictet's great work on Palaeontology, pub- lished in 1844-46 and 1853-57, the conclusions on the first ap- pearance and disappearance of several groups of animals have been considerably modified; and a third edition would require still further changes. I may recall the well-known fact that in geological treatises, published not many years ago, mammals were always spoken of as having abruptly come in at the commencement of the tertiary series. And now one of the richest known accumulations of fossil mam- mals belongs to the middle of the secondary series ; and true mammals have been discovered in the new red sandstone at . nearly the commencement of this great series. Cuvier used to urge that no monkey occurred in any tertiary stratum ; but now extinct species have been discovered in India, South America, and in Europe, as far back as the miocene stage. Had it not been for the rare accident of the preservation of footsteps in the new red sandstone of the United States, who would have ventured to suppose that no less than at least thirty different bird-like animals, some of gigantic size, existed during that period? Not a fragment of bone has been dis- covered in these beds. Not long ago, palaeontologists main- tained that the whole class of birds came suddenly into ex- istence during the eocene period; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived dur- ing the deposition of the upper greensand ; and still more re- cently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long