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There is a laboratory of invertebrate paleontology of Paleozoic age, with a corps of paleontologists. Mr. C.D. Walcott is in charge. There is a laboratory of fossil botany, with a corps of paleobotanists, Mr. Lester F. Ward being in charge.
Bowen and I roomed together at college, and I learned a lot from him outside my regular course. He was a pretty good scholar despite his love of fun, and his particular hobby was paleontology.
It is a fact well known to the students of paleontology, that species and genera which have been long on the earth are apt to become in a way rigid as regards their qualities of body and mind.
This adaptation of all the parts of the animal to one another extends to the most diverse parts of the organism, and enables the skilled anatomist, from the observation of a single typical part, to draw inferences as to the structure of the entire animal a fact which was of vast aid to Cuvier in his studies of paleontology.
It seemed odd to be eating a creature that should, by all the laws of paleontology, have been extinct for several million years. It gave one a feeling of newness that was almost embarrassing, although it didn't seem to embarrass our appetites. Olson ate until I thought he would burst. The girl ate with us that night at the little officers' mess just back of the torpedo compartment.
These assuredly are great and solid gains. But this is not all. Allied with geology, paleontology has established two laws of inestimable importance: the first, that one and the same area of the earth's surface has been successively occupied by very different kinds of living beings; the second, that the order of succession established in one locality holds good, approximately, in all.
Fortunately, however, the results have been rescued from that partial oblivion by such interpreters as Professors Huxley and Cope, so the unscientific public has been allowed to gain at least an inkling of the wonderful progress of paleontology in our generation. The writings of Huxley in particular epitomize the record.
They have enabled us greatly to shorten the time biological evolution seems to demand. They also render us less exacting toward paleontology. So that, all things considered, the transformist hypothesis looks more and more like a close approximation to the truth.
On the one hand, those who contend that higher organisms have been evolved out of lower, joined with those who contend that successively higher organisms have been created at successively later periods, appeal for proof to the facts of Paleontology; which, they say, countenance their views.
We have heard almost nothing hitherto of such sciences as paleontology, geology, and meteorology, each of which now demands full attention. Meantime, astronomy and what the workers of the elder day called natural philosophy become wonderfully diversified and present numerous phases that would have been startling enough to the star-gazers and philosophers of the earlier epoch.
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