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Professor Owen, in his Palaeontology, has advanced similar views, and has remarked, in regard to the vertebrata that there is much positive as well as negative evidence in support of the doctrine of an advance in the scale of being, from ancient to more modern geological periods.
The fishing-ground of the geologist in the Silurian and Devonian periods is even more circumscribed than his, and belongs, besides, not to a living, but to a dead world, far more difficult to decipher. But the sciences of Geology and Palaeontology are making such rapid progress, now that they go hand in hand, that our familiarity with past creations is daily increasing.
When I addressed you in 1862, I should have been bold indeed had I suggested that palaeontology would before long show us the possibility of a direct transition from the type of the lizard to that of the ostrich.
The whole fabric of palaeontology is based upon two propositions: the first is, that fossils are the remains of animals and plants; and the second is, that the stratified rocks in which they are found are sedimentary deposits; and each of these propositions is founded upon the same axiom, that like effects imply like causes.
It is our only means of fixing some points in the immensity of space, and of setting a certain number of waymarks along the eternal path of time." Buffon enumerates five classes of these monuments of the past history of the earth, and they are all facts of palaeontology.
Classical history is a great section of the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as for other kinds of palaeontology that is to say, a respect for the facts which it establishes as for all facts, and a still greater respect for it as a preparation for the discovery of a law of progress.
Passing from these difficulties, the other great leading facts in palaeontology agree admirably with the theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection.
It is also worthy of special note that this time the blow is dealt from the side of palaeontology; for, even if now and again we dissent from Steinmann, in this we fully agree with him that the historical method of considering the evidences of bygone periods of creation is at the very least quite as important for passing correct judgment regarding descent, as is the investigation of contemporary living organisms.
A second consideration which the study of the coal brings prominently before the mind of any one who is familiar with palaeontology is, that the coal Flora, viewed in relation to the enormous period of time which it lasted, and to the still vaster period which has elapsed since it flourished, underwent little change while it endured, and in its peculiar characters, differs strangely little from that which at present exist.
I had followed all these things and many kindred things by dissection and in embryology I had checked the whole theory of development again in a year's course of palaeontology, and I had taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the stars, in a course of astronomical physics.
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