Origin of Species Variorum

and intermediate forms having transmitted to the present day descendants but little modified, constitute our so-called osculant or aberrant species. The more aberrant any form is, the greater must be the number of connecting forms which ... have been exterminated and utterly lost. And we have some evidence of aberrant groups having suffered severely from extinction, for they are almost always represented by extremely few species; and such species as do occur are generally very distinct from each other, which again implies extinction. The genera Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, for example, would not have been less aberrant had each been represented by a dozen species instead of by a single one, or by one or two. We can, I think, account for this fact only by looking at aberrant groups as forms which have been conquered by more successful competitors, with a few members still preserved under unusually favourable conditions.

Mr. Waterhouse has remarked that, when a member belonging to one group of animals exhibits an affinity to a quite distinct group, this affinity in most cases is general and not special: thus, according to Mr. Waterhouse, of all Rodents, the bizcacha is most nearly related to Marsupials; but in the points in which it approaches this order, its relations are general, and not to any one marsupial species more than to another. As the points of affinity ... are believed to be real and not merely adaptive, they must be due in accordance with our view to inheritance from a common progenitor. Therefore we must suppose either that all Rodents, including the bizcacha, branched off from some .. ancient Marsupial, which will naturally have been more or less intermediate in character with respect to all existing Marsupials; or that both Rodents and Marsupials branched off from a common progenitor, and that both groups have since