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What competent palaeontologist will affirm, at this present moment, that he knows anything about the period at which life originated, or will assert more than the extreme probability that such origin was a long way antecedent to any traces of life at present known?
I may add that the only traces of volcanic action in the Causses have been found at Sauveterre, near the so-called capital. Here basaltic rocks exist amid the limestone. It is not only the geologist and the botanist, in search of an emotion, to use a French phrase, who will find a paradise here. The palaeontologist is no less happy.
We have already (in the preceding number) sketched some of the reasons suggestive of such a theory of derivation of species, reasons which give it plausibility, and even no small probability, as applied to our actual world and to changes occurring since the latest tertiary period. We are well pleased at this moment to find that the conclusions we were arriving at in this respect are sustained by the very high authority and impartial judgment of Pictet, the Swiss palaeontologist. In his review of Darwin's book,[b] much the fairest and most admirable opposing one that has yet appeared, he freely accepts that ensemble of natural operations which Darwin impersonates under the now familiar name of Natural Selection, allows that the exposition throughout the first chapters seems "
In this case, the palaeontologist is called upon suddenly to intercalate about 800 species of Mollusca and Radiata, between the fauna of the Lower Lias and that of the Middle Trias. The period in question was previously believed, even by many a philosophical geologist, to have been comparatively barren of organic types.
This was a sore trouble to me, adding, as I then thought, one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published, when a skilful palaeontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen of an unmistakable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium.
The palaeontologist was, by this time, able to speak as confidently about the animal of the Belemnite, as Zadig was respecting the queen's spaniel. He could give a very fair description of its external appearance, and even enter pretty fully into the details of its internal organisation, and yet could declare that neither he, nor any one else, had ever seen one.
Like the other, he had a powder-horn and pouch, but instead of knife and pistol, a canvass bag or haversack hung from his shoulder; and had you looked into it, you would have seen that it was half filled with shells, pieces of rock, and rare plants, gathered during the day the diurnal storehouse of the geologist, the palaeontologist, and botanist to be emptied for study and examination by the night camp-fire.
That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment.
This was a sore trouble to me, adding as I thought one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published, when a skilful palaeontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen of an unmistakeable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium.
To the north, beds of peat would be formed by grasses, and in other parts, temperate and tropical forms of plants and animals would be preserved in such equally balanced proportions as to confound the palaeontologist; with the bones of the long-snouted alligator, Gangetic porpoise, Indian cow, buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant, tiger, deer, boar; and a host of other animals, he would meet with acorns of several species of oak, pine-cones and magnolia fruits, rose seeds, and Cycas nuts, with palm nuts, screw-pines, and other tropical productions.
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