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Updated: June 5, 2025
As I slowly recalled my collegiate studies and paleontological readings in Bowen's textbooks, I realized that I had looked upon nothing less than a diplodocus of the Upper Jurassic; but how infinitely different was the true, live thing from the crude restorations of Hatcher and Holland! I had had the idea that the diplodocus was a land-animal, but evidently it is partially amphibious.
This paleontological fact is very important, because it fully harmonises with the evolutionary succession of the Mammal orders that is deduced from their comparative anatomy and ontogeny. The latter science teaches us that the whole Mammal class divides into three main groups or sub-classes, which correspond to three successive phylogenetic stages.
But the one can adduce more direct evidence than the other, as the paleontological material of philology the old monuments of the extinct tongue have been preserved much better than the paleontological material of zoology, the fossilised bones and imprints of vertebrates.
For every single species that has been preserved for us in the rocks there are probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of extinct species that have left no trace behind them. This extreme and very unfortunate incompleteness of the paleontological evidence, which cannot be pointed out too often, is easily explained. It is absolutely inevitable in the circumstances of the fossilisation of organisms.
Besides these periodically-recurring changes of climate, there are the irregular ones produced by redistributions of land and sea; and these, sometimes less, sometimes greater, in degree, than the rhythmical changes, must, like them, cause in each region emigrations and immigrations of species; and consequent breaks, small or large as the case may be, in the paleontological series.
The Anniversary Meeting of the Geological Society seems to be an occasion well suited for an undertaking of this kind for an inquiry, in fact, into the nature and value of the present results of paleontological investigation; and the more so, as all those who have paid close attention to the late multitudinous discussions in which paleontology is implicated, must have felt the urgent necessity of some such scrutiny.
The bureau comprises one geographical, twelve geological, six paleontological and four accessory divisions. A division of mines and mining publishes an annual report on the mineral resources and production of the United States. The Superintendent of the Census. The Superintendent of the Census is appointed each decade for the purpose of taking the regular decennial census.
"There no longer exists," he says, "a 'missing link. The phyletic continuity of the primate stem, from the oldest lemurs down to man himself, is an historical fact." It should, perhaps, be added that the force of this rather startling conclusion rests by no means exclusively upon the finding of pithecanthropus and the other fossils, nor indeed upon any paleontological evidence whatever.
The only two other continents where such work, of like volume and value, remains to be done are Africa and Asia; and neither Africa nor Asia offers a more inviting field for the best kind of field worker in geographical exploration and in zoological, geological, and paleontological investigation.
Unquestionably, the distribution of many forms of life, past and present, offers problems which with our present paleontological knowledge we are wholly unable to solve.
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