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Updated: June 28, 2025
The other hypothesis is, that the successive species of animals and plants have arisen, the later by the gradual modification of the earlier. This is the hypothesis of evolution; and the palaeontological discoveries of the last decade are so completely in accordance with the requirements of this hypothesis that, if it had not existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it.
It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations en masse; but catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted on all hands that the seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.
Associated with the marls and limestones of Monte Bolca are beds containing lignite and shale with numerous plants, which have been described by Unger and Massalongo, and referred by them to the Eocene period. That scarcely any one of the Monte Bolca fish should have been found in any other locality in Europe, is a striking illustration of the extreme imperfection of the palaeontological record.
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.
The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it.
Fossil specimens of a similar, if not the same, species have recently been detected in the Rocky Mountains by Hayden, and determined by our eminent palaeontological botanist, Lesquereux; and he assures me that he has the common redwood itself from Oregon in a deposit of tertiary age.
The characters of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks were established so fully, both on stratigraphical and palaeontological data, by Sir Roderick Murchison after five years' labour, in 1839, when his "Silurian System" was published, that these formations could from that period be recognised and identified in all other parts of Europe and in North America, even in countries where most of the fossils differed specifically from those of the classical region in Britain, where they were first studied.
It was once supposed that this succession had been the result of vast successive catastrophes, destructions, and re-creations en masse; but catastrophes are now almost eliminated from geological, or at least palaeontological speculation; and it is admitted, on all hands, that the seeming breaks in the chain of being are not absolute, but only relative to our imperfect knowledge; that species have replaced species, not in assemblages, but one by one; and that, if it were possible to have all the phenomena of the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum.
On the coast, beneath the white chalk of Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, an argillaceous formation crops out, called the Speeton clay, several hundred feet in thickness, the palaeontological relations of which have been ably worked out by Mr.
But, pending the construction of a surer foundation than palaeontology 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 palaeontological facts are justifiable.
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