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We see this in the plainest manner by the fact that all the most eminent palaeontologists, namely Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.
The fossil shells in the Cordillera of Central Chile, in the opinion of all the palaeontologists who have examined them, belong to the earlier stages of the cretaceous system; whilst in Northern Chile there is a most singular mixture of cretaceous and oolitic forms: from the geological relations, however, of these two districts, I cannot but think that they all belong to nearly the same epoch, which I have provisionally called cretaceo-oolitic.
Towards the close of our voyage I received a letter whilst at Ascension, in which my sisters told me that Sedgwick had called on my father, and said that I should take a place among the leading scientific men. My collection of fossil bones, which had been sent to Henslow, also excited considerable attention amongst palaeontologists.
Geologists and palaeontologists write about the "beginning of life" and the "first-created forms of living beings," as if they were the most familiar things in the world; and even cautious writers seem to be on quite friendly terms with the "archetype" whereby the Creator was guided "amidst the crash of falling worlds."
Hence we now positively know that sessile cirripedes existed during the secondary period; and these cirripedes might have been the progenitors of our many tertiary and existing species. The case most frequently insisted on by palaeontologists of the apparently sudden appearance of a whole group of species, is that of the teleostean fishes, low down in the Chalk period.
So that by this fundamental test of victory in the battle for life, as well as by the standard of the specialisation of organs, modern forms ought, on the theory of natural selection, to stand higher than ancient forms. Is this the case? A large majority of palaeontologists would answer in the affirmative; and it seems that this answer must be admitted as true, though difficult of proof.
It should not be forgotten, that at the present day, with perfect specimens for examination, two forms can seldom be connected by intermediate varieties and thus proved to be the same species, until many specimens have been collected from many places; and in the case of fossil species this could rarely be effected by palaeontologists.
The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species.
Falconer, in a memoir which he is now preparing for the press on the European Pliocene and Pleistocene species of the genus Rhinoceros, has shown that, under the above name of R. leptorhinus, three distinct species have been confounded by Cuvier, Owen, and other palaeontologists:
In the opinion of many palaeontologists, the ancestors of the present hoofed beasts, or ungulates, were contained among these Condylarthra, as they were named by Prof. Cope.
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