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Updated: June 8, 2025
It is desirable to speak of these excellent books, and of their distinguished authors, with the utmost respect, and in a tone as far as possible removed from carping criticism; indeed, if they are specially cited in this place, it is merely in justification of the assertion that the following propositions, which may be found implicitly, or explicitly, in the works in question, are regarded by the mass of paleontologists and geologists, not only on the Continent but in this country, as expressing some of the best-established results of paleontology.
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.
All the interesting phenomena that we meet in ontogeny and paleontology, comparative anatomy and dysteleology, the distribution and habits of organisms all the important general laws that we abstract from the phenomena of these sciences, and combine in harmonious unity are the broad bases of our great biological induction.
The vicissitudes in the history of humanity during its stay on this southern continent have been as strange, varied, and inexplicable as paleontology shows to have been the case, on the same continent, in the history of the higher forms of animal life during the age of mammals.
Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian of a circulating library: the safe pilot of middle class ladies through the ocean of new fiction which overwhelms the British Isles twice a year. His particular hobby was paleontology.
Hilaire and De Blainville, from different points of view, contested Cuvier's hypothesis; and the discussion, which has much interest as bearing on paleontology, has been recently revived under a somewhat modified form: Professors Huxley and Owen being respectively the assailant and defender of the hypothesis.
This, however, has not been done, and most probably the inquiry will at once be made To what end burden science with a new and strange term in place of one old, familiar, and part of our common language? The reply to this question will become obvious as the inquiry into the results of paleontology is pushed further.
The contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages.
Such are the results of paleontology as they appear, and have for some years appeared, to the mind of an inquirer who regards that study simply as one of the applications of the great biological sciences, and who desires to see it placed upon the same sound basis as other branches of physical inquiry.
In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem.
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