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Curtis; "only I must say I think it was due to us to have mentioned it sooner." "Not at all, mother. Fanny knew it, and it was nobody's concern but hers. Pray am I to have Owen's 'Palaeontology'?" "No, Colonel Keith bought that, and some more of the solid books. My dear, he is going to settle here; he tells me he has actually bought that house he and his brother are in." "Bought it!"

James Hall, state geologist of New York, author of many able and well-known works on geology and palaeontology, I examined the glacial drift and erratics of the county of Berkshire, Massachusetts, and those of the adjoining parts of the state of New York, a district about 130 miles inland from the Atlantic coast and situated due west of Boston in latitude 42 degrees 25 minutes north.

It is on this very simple principle, and not upon imaginary laws of physiological correlation, about which, in most cases, we know nothing whatever, that the so-called restorations of the palaeontologist are based. Abundant illustrations of this truth will occur to every one who is familiar with palaeontology; none is more suitable than the case of the so-called Belemnites.

So far from palaeontology lending no support to the doctrine of evolution as one sees constantly asserted that doctrine, if it had no other support, would have been irresistibly forced upon us by the palaeontological discoveries of the last twenty years.

Can we form any mental picture of the actual animal forms that the manward impulse has traveled through? With all the light that palaeontology throws upon the animal life of the past, can we see where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our ancestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile in the slime of the jungle or in the waters of the Mesozoic world? What was he like or what akin to?

But these propositions almost constitute the frame-work of palaeontology. In order to complete it but one addition was needed, and that was made, in the last years of the eighteenth century, by William Smith, whose work comes so near our own times that many living men may have been personally acquainted with him.

Beyond this limit our knowledge of the highest class of vertebrata does not as yet extend into the past, but the frequent shifting back of the old landmarks, nearly all of them once supposed in their turn to indicate the date of the first appearance of warm-blooded quadrupeds on this planet, should serve as a warning to us not to consider the goal at present reached by palaeontology as one beyond which they who come after us are never destined to pass.

Then the inconvenient reptiles are banished out of sight; and, finally, the question of the exact meaning of "higher" and "ordinary" in the case of mammals opens up the prospect of a hopeful logomachy. But what is the good of it all in the face of Leviticus on the one hand and of palaeontology on the other?

But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most complex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and palaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle in the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through which the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the complete past whence it has come.

The Anniversary Meeting of the Geological Society seems to be an occasion well suited for an undertaking of this kind for an inquiry, in fact, into the nature and value of the present results of palaeontological investigation; and the more so, as all those who have paid close attention to the late multitudinous discussions in which palaeontology is implicated, must have felt the urgent necessity of some such scrutiny.