United States or Qatar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To return to an example already given: All competent authorities will probably assent to the proposition that physical geology does not enable us in any way to reply to this question Were the British Cretaceous rocks deposited at the same time as those of India, or are they a million of years younger or a million of years older? Is palaeontology able to succeed where physical geology fails?
Even that feat of palaeontology which has so powerfully impressed the popular imagination, the reconstruction of an extinct animal from a tooth or a bone, is based upon the simplest imaginable application of the logic of Steno. A moment's consideration will show, in fact, that Steno's conclusion that the glossopetrae are sharks' teeth implies the reconstruction of an animal from its tooth.
Viewed in this light the facts of palaeontology receive a meaning upon any other hypothesis, I am unable to see, in the slightest degree, what knowledge or signification we are to draw out of them.
In answer to the question "What, then, does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of palaeontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose that modification to have taken place by a necessary progress from more to less embryonic forms, from more to less generalised types, within the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous rocks?"
In other words, when rightly studied, the teachings of palaeontology are at one with those of physical geology. Our farthest explorations carry us back but a little way above the mouth of the great river of Life: where it arose, and by what channels the noble tide has reached the point when it first breaks upon our view, is hidden from us.
And to this end let us define somewhat more exactly the extent of these pretensions of palaeontology. Every one is aware that Professor Bronn's "Untersuchungen" and Professor Pictet's "Traité de Paléontologie" are works of standard authority, familiarly consulted by every working palaeontologist.
To this Professor Kolliker replies, with perfect justice, that the conclusion drawn by Pelzeln does not really follow from Darwin's premisses, and that, if we take the facts of Palaeontology as they stand, they rather support than oppose Darwin's theory.
Steinmann declares it to be the primary task of post-Darwinian palaeontology "to arrange the fossil animal and plant-remains in the order of descent and thus to build up a truly natural, because historically demonstrable, classification of the animal and plant-world."
But the true explanation of the seeming anomaly is this, that no one can believe in transmutation who is not profoundly convinced that all we know in palaeontology is as nothing compared with what we have yet to learn, and they who regard the record as so fragmentary, and our acquaintance with the fragments which are extant as so rudimentary, are apt to be astounded at the confidence placed by the progressionists in data which must be defective in the extreme.
The settlement of the nature of fossils led at once to the next advance of palaeontology, viz. its application to the deciphering of the history of the earth.
Word Of The Day