For, as a general thing,
all or most of the species of a peculiar genus or other type are
grouped in the same country, or occupy continuous, proximate, or
accessible areas. So well does this rule hold, so general is the
implication that kindred species are or were associated
geographically, that most trustworthy naturalists, quite free from
hypotheses of transmutation, are constantly inferring former
geographical continuity between parts of the world now widely
disjoined, in order to account thereby for the generic similarities
among their inhabitants. Yet no scientific explanation has been
offered to account for the geographical association of kindred
species, except the hypothesis of a common origin.
4. Here the fact of the antiquity of creation, and in particular of
the present kinds of the earth's inhabitants, or of a large part of
them, comes in to rebut the objection, that there has not been time
enough for any marked diversification of living things through
divergent variation,--not time enough for varieties to have diverged
into what we call species.
So long as the existing species of plants and animals were thought to
have originated a few thousand years ago and without predecessors,
there was no room for a theory of derivation of one sort from
another, nor time enough even to account for the establishment of the
races which are generally believed to have diverged from a common
stock.
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