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Updated: June 22, 2025
Palaeontologists have long maintained that the same species which have a wide range in space are also the most persistent in time, which may prepare us to find that some plants having a vast geographical range may also have endured from the period of the Upper Devonian to that of the Millstone Grit. Scale of Holoptychius nobilissimus, Agassiz. Holoptychius, as restored by Professor Huxley. a.
Had the lithographic stone of Solenhofen, now regarded as so rich in fossils, been in like manner quarried solely for scientific objects, it would have remained almost a sealed book to palaeontologists, so sparsely are the organic remains scattered through it.
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 by none more forcibly than by Professor Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species.
Not long ago, palaeontologists maintained that the whole class of birds came suddenly into existence during the eocene period; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solenhofen.
Although each formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each probably is short compared with the period requisite to change one species into another. I am aware that two palaeontologists, whose opinions are worthy of much deference, namely Bronn and Woodward, have concluded that the average duration of each formation is twice or thrice as long as the average duration of specific forms.
But the imperfection in the geological record largely results from another and more important cause than any of the foregoing; namely, from the several formations being separated from each other by wide intervals of time. This doctrine has been emphatically admitted by many geologists and palaeontologists, who, like E. Forbes, entirely disbelieve in the change of species.
All that we have a right to expect, is that those groups, which have within known geological periods undergone much modification, should in the older formations make some slight approach to each other; so that the older members should differ less from each other in some of their characters than do the existing members of the same groups; and this by the concurrent evidence of our best palaeontologists seems frequently to be the case.
But let us suppose that no fruit, seed, or flower had ever been met with in a fossil state, we should still have been indebted to the persevering labours of botanical palaeontologists for one of the grandest scientific discoveries for which the present century is remarkable namely, the proofs now established of the prevalence of a mild climate and a rich arborescent flora in the arctic regions in that Miocene epoch on the history of which we are now entering.
Indeed many eminent palaeontologists, and among them Professor Pictet, think that, numerically considered, the larger portion of the mammalian fauna agrees specifically with that of our own period, so that we are scarcely entitled to feel surprised if we find human races of the Pleistocene epoch undistinguishable from some living ones.
All Palaeontologists, European and American, such as MM. De Verneuil, D. Sharpe, Professor Hall, E. Billings, and others, who have entered upon this comparison, admit that there is a marked general correspondence in the succession of fossil forms, and even species, as we trace the organic remains downward from the highest to the lowest beds; but it is impossible to parallel each minor subdivision.
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