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Updated: June 5, 2025
The relations of the horse and tapir in the paleontological history of South America are very curious. Both were, geologically speaking, comparatively recent immigrants, and if they came at different dates it is almost certain that the horse came later.
Considered from this point of view, no one will dispute that the form of the caudal fin is of high importance for zoological and paleontological considerations, since it shows that the same thought, the same plan, which presides to-day over the formation of the embryo, is also manifested in the successive development of the numerous creation which have formerly peopled the earth."
Darwin relies upon indirect proofs, the bearing of which is real and incontestable;" who concedes that "his theory accords very well with the great facts of comparative anatomy and zoology comes in admirably to explain unity of composition of organisms, also to explain rudimentary and representative organs, and the natural series of genera and species equally corresponds with many paleontological data agrees well with the specific resemblances which exist between two successive faunas, with the parallelism which is sometimes observed between the series of paleontological succession and of embryonal development," etc.; and finally, although he does not accept the theory in these results, he allows that "it appears to offer the best means of explaining the manner in which organized beings were produced in epochs anterior to our own."
On the strength of this paleontological fact, we may suppose that they belonged to Marsupials. At all events, we have no fossil remains of indubitable Placentals from that period. Most of them live in Australia, and a small part of the Australian and East Malayan islands. There is now not a single living Marsupial on the mainland of Europe, Asia, or Africa.
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.
Add to this the fact that only small territories of the earth have been explored geologically, he says, and it becomes clear that the paleontological record as we now possess it shows but a mere fragment of the past history of organisms on the earth. It is a history "imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect.
But why should our speculative botanists insist upon these "evolutional changes" in plant-life these "derivative forms" of which they are constantly speaking? Paleontological botany has given us the very highest antiquity of species, and the most that can be claimed is that nature was just as prolific of diversified forms millions of years ago as now.
A day or two before this date the professor of paleontology, J. P. Smith, famed not only for his erudition but for his especial kindness to all geology students especially if they did well in paleontology came to the worrying Senior with a paper that Hoover had written sometime before on a paleontological subject, and said to him: "Look here, you will never pass that examination in the state you are in.
For those who do not cherish pedantic and sectarian prejudices, this hypothesis is changed into assurance by modern discoveries; it is shown in the transformations and transitions of paleontological forms; in the embryogenic evolution of so many animals, man included, which, according to their various species, reveals the lower types whence they issued; in the successive forms taken by the foetus; in the powerful and indisputable laws of selection; in the modifications by adaptation of the different organisms, and in the effects of isolation.
He felt this distinction the more because the bearing of such investigations upon experimental physiology had never before been pointed out, and it showed that he had succeeded in giving a new direction and a more comprehensive character to paleontological research.
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