WCP3755

[1]

Rosehill, Dorking.

May 27th. 1877

Dear Huxley¹

Many thanks for your American Lectures, which I am reading with great interest. Your remark on the great range in time of the Ichthyosauria & Plesiosauria with great variety, but little indication of ^progressive modification or transition, seems almost as strong a case against Evolution as the many intermediate types of mammalia are in favour of it.

The only way out of this & [2] other like difficulties seems to me to lie in the immense imperfection of the Geol. record in the Palaeozoic rocks, & in the belief that even vertebrata, in many varied forms, existed throughout the whole epoch of the Palaeozoic formations, & perhaps even into the vanished earlier rocks. Hardly any one dwells on this necessity but Darwin,² because, I suppose, if it is so speculative, but it seems to me the only way out of [3] the difficulty of the apparently sudden & well developed appearance of all the great types of animals in almost the earliest fossiliferous rocks.

Looking at the Silurian Echinoderms, Crustacea, Mollusca & fishes; — the Devonian winged insects, & the Carboniferous Reptiles & Land snails, it seems hardly too much to say, that to develop all these from the lowest forms of life requires a space of unrecorded time & of lost formations equal to that from the Silurian to the present day.

Is not that so, & does it not want dwelling upon?

Yours very faithfully ׀ Alfred R. Wallace. [signature]

T. H. Huxley.