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Updated: June 28, 2025
Now, it is perfectly clear that if our palaeontological collections are to be taken, even approximately, as an adequate representation of all the forms of animals and plants that have ever lived; and if the record furnished by the known series of beds of stratified rock covers the whole series of events which constitute the history of life on the globe, such a fact as this directly contravenes the hypothesis of evolution; because this hypothesis postulates that the existence of every form must have been preceded by that of some form little different from it.
I also cited M. Desnoyers' comments on the absence among the bones of wild and domestic animals found in old Gaulish tombs of all intermixture of extinct species of quadrupeds, as proving that the oldest sepulchral monuments then known in France had no claims to high antiquity founded on palaeontological data.
Cuvier, in the "Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe," strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the invention of a new method of palaeontological research. But if you will turn to the "Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles" and watch Cuvier, not speculating, but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of Steno.
If we accept M. Lartet's interpretation of the ossiferous deposits of Aurignac, both inside and outside the grotto, they add nothing to the palaeontological evidence in favour of Man's antiquity, for we have seen all the same mammalia associated elsewhere with flint implements, and some species, such as the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and Hippopotamus major, missing here, have been met with in other places.
And if this be the case, the late advances which have been made in palaeontological discovery open out a new field for such prophecies.
They have yielded about forty species of fossils, of which six only are common to the overlying Tremadoc rocks, but the two formations are closely allied by having several characteristic "primordial" genera in common. According to Mr. Belt, who has devoted much attention to these beds, there are already palaeontological data for subdividing the Lingula Flags into three sections.
In this reform they were aided by a suggestion of Mr. Lonsdale, who, after studying the Devonshire fossils, perceived that they belonged to a peculiar palaeontological type of intermediate character between the Carboniferous and Silurian.
Nearly 40,000 species of animals and plants have been added to the Systema Naturae by palaeontological research. This is a living population equivalent to that of a new continent in mere number; equivalent to that of a new hemisphere, if we take into account the small population of insects as yet found fossil, and the large proportion and peculiar organisation of many of the Vertebrata.
Fifty years hence, whoever undertakes to record the progress of palaeontology will note the present time as the epoch in which the law of succession of the forms of the higher animals was determined by the observation of palaeontological facts.
Therefore the study of the early human races is, necessarily, closely connected with, and dependent upon, a knowledge of the Central Asian mammalian life and its distribution. No systematic palaeontological, archaeological, or zoölogical study of this region on a large scale has ever been attempted, and there is no similar area of the inhabited surface of the earth about which so little is known.
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