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Updated: June 8, 2025
But, pending the construction of a surer foundation than paleontology now possesses, it may be instructive, assuming for the nonce the general correctness of the ordinary hypothesis of geological contemporaneity, to consider whether the deductions which are ordinarily drawn from the whole body of paleontologic facts are justifiable.
Absurd expressions like this only show that the famous pathological anatomist, who did so much for medicine in the establishment of cellular pathology, had not the requisite attainments in comparative anatomy and ontogeny, systematic zoology and paleontology, for sound judgment in the province of anthropology.
But in 1859 appeared a book which, though not dealing primarily with paleontology, yet contained a chapter that revealed the geological record in an altogether new light. The book was Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, the chapter that wonderful citation of the "Imperfections of the Geological Record."
Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men;" who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk of the "flowers and fruits" of the plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be "entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?"
But I feel that I have a debt to pay to my adopted country, and all I can now do is to contribute my share toward maintaining the scientific activity which has been awakened during the last few years, and which even at this moment is on the increase. I am now at Nahant, on the sea-shore, studying embryology chiefly with reference to paleontology, and the results are most satisfactory.
It will be preferable to turn to the positive facts of paleontology, and to inquire what they tell us.
PICKERING, EDWARD CHARLES. Born at Boston, July 19, 1846; graduated Lawrence Scientific School, 1865; professor of astronomy and director of Harvard Observatory since 1877. MARSH, OTHNIEL CHARLES. Born at Lockport, New York, October 29, 1831; professor paleontology Yale University, 1866, to death at New Haven, March 18, 1899.
First in order, as the most definite and unquestionable of all the results of paleontology, must be mentioned the immense extension and impulse given to botany, zoology, and comparative anatomy, by the investigation of fossil remains.
Six years later, when reviewing the work of Marsh in America and of Gaudry in Pikermi, he declared that, "on the evidence of paleontology, the evolution of many existing forms of animal life from their predecessors is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact."
Professor Huxley in his "Lay Sermons" admits that an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of paleontology "Either shows us no evidence of such modification, or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight; and as to the nature of that modification, it yields no evidence whatsoever that the earlier members of any long-continued group were more generalized in structure than the later ones."
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