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Updated: June 8, 2025
But, pending the construction of a surer foundation than palæontology now possesses, it may be instructive, assuming for the nonce the general correctness of the ordinary hypothesis of geological contemporaneity, to consider whether the deductions which are ordinarily drawn from the whole body of palæontological facts are justifiable.
And, to tell the truth, he missed the old creature herself, her understanding of him and his ideas, her contemporaneity; and no one else would work for a dollar a week. Presently in the course of his eating the old gentleman required another biscuit, and he wanted a hot one.
It could hardly have said as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two hundred years old to begin with, and consoled myself as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the unaging antiquity at Hampton Court.
But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce.
But the moment the geologist has to deal with large areas, or with completely separated deposits, the mischief of confounding that "homotaxis" or "similarity of arrangement," which can be demonstrated, with "synchrony" or "identity of date," for which there is not a shadow of proof, under the one common term of "contemporaneity" becomes incalculable, and proves the constant source of gratuitous speculations.
Succession implies time; the lower members of a series of sedimentary rocks are certainly older than the upper; and when the notion of age was once introduced as the equivalent of succession, it was no wonder that correspondence in succession came to be looked upon as a correspondence in age, or "contemporaneity."
But if it be a demonstrable fact that strata containing more than 60 or 70 per cent. of species of Mollusca in common, and comparatively close together, may yet be separated by an amount of geological time sufficient to allow of some of the greatest physical changes the world has seen, what becomes of that sort of contemporaneity the sole evidence of which is a similarity of facies, or the identity of half a dozen species, or of a good many genera?
Abbott in the alluvial deposits of the Delaware and those recently announced in Nevada, prove the contemporaneity of men like ourselves with the great edentate and pachydermatous mammals, which were the most characteristic creatures of the American fauna.
On what amount of similarity of their faunæ is the doctrine of the contemporaneity of the European and of the North American Silurians based?
When we find contemporaneity alleged on the strength of a community no greater than that which sometimes exists between strata of widely-different ages in the same country, it seems as though the above-quoted caution had been forgotten. It appears to be assumed for the occasion, that species which had a wide range in space had a narrow range in time; which is the reverse of the fact.
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