This has proved to be an exaggeration, but Professor Chamberlin
seems to fall into an exaggeration on the other side when he says
that 300 out of 10,000 species survived. There are only about 300
species of animals and plants known in the whole of the Permian
rocks (Geikie), and most of these are new. For instance, of the
enormous plant-population of the Coal-forests, comprising many
thousands of species, only fifty species survived unchanged in
the Permian. We may say that, as far as our knowledge goes, of
every thirty species of animals and plants in the Carboniferous
period, twenty-eight were blotted out of the calendar of life for
ever; one survived by undergoing such modifications that it
became a new species, and one was found fit to endure the new
conditions for a time. We must leave it to the imagination to
appreciate the total devastation of individuals entailed in this
appalling application of what we call natural selection.
But what higher types of life issued from the womb of nature
after so long and painful a travail? The annihilation of the
unfit is the seamy side, though the most real side, of natural
selection. We ignore it, or extenuate it, and turn rather to
consider the advances in organisation by which the survivors were
enabled to outlive the great chill and impoverishment.
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