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Updated: May 8, 2025
To return to an example already given: All competent authorities will probably assent to the proposition that physical geology does not enable us in any way to reply to this question Were the British Cretaceous rocks deposited at the same time as those of India, or are they a million of years younger or a million of years older? Is paleontology able to succeed where physical geology fails?
Truth independent; truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its 'prescription, and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity.
For anything that geology or paleontology are able to show to the contrary, a Devonian fauna and flora in the British Islands may have been contemporaneous with Silurian life in North America, and with a Carboniferous fauna and flora in Africa.
She reviewed at length a set of French encyclopedias which had been given to the library, and spoke with enthusiasm of a remarkable collection of jaw-bones of the prehistoric cow which had been presented to the department of paleontology.
What then does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of paleontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose that modification to have taken place by a necessary progress from more to less embryonic forms, or from more to less generalized types, within the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous rocks?
But the work of both men was distinctively American, for Audubon devoted his life to the study of American birds, and Agassiz the latter part of his to the study and classification of American fishes as well as to services of the most valuable kind in the field of geology and paleontology. Audubon's story is a curious and interesting one.
Here one of the most eminent of American names is that of Othniel Charles Marsh. A graduate of Yale and firmly grounded in zoology and kindred sciences by a course of study at Heidelberg and Berlin, he returned to the United States in 1866 to accept the chair of paleontology which had been established for him at Yale.
The preceding arguments make no particular claim to novelty; indeed they have been floating more or less distinctly before the minds of geologists for the last thirty years; and if, at the present time, it has seemed desirable to give them more definite and systematic expression, it is because paleontology is every day assuming a greater importance, and now requires to rest on a basis the firmness of which is thoroughly well assured.
The statistical story of the first period, under that accurate classification, would be about as interesting as a bulletin of real-estate transactions in Chicago would be to a professor of paleontology in the Sorbonne. Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the newspapers of the early part of the nineteenth century, gave no outward suggestion of being places of miracles sacred places.
And to this end let us define somewhat more exactly the extent of these pretensions of paleontology. Every one is aware that Professor Bronn's 'Untersuchungen' and Professor Pictet's 'Traite de Paleontologie' are works of standard authority, familiarly consulted by every working paleontologist.
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