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  • The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.

    Sir Charles Lyell (1863). “The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man: With Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation”, p.470