nal conditions.
Of what use to the diamond is its high specific gravity and high
refrangibility, and to gold of its yellow colour and great weight? These
substances continue to exist in virtue of other properties than these.
It is impossible to suppose that the properties of living matter at
its first appearance were all useful to it, for even now after aeons of
elimination we find that it possesses many useless organs and that
many of its relations to the external world are capable of considerable
improvement.

In writing this essay I have purposely refrained from taking a definite
position with regard to the problems touched. My desire has been
to write a chapter showing the influence of Darwin's work so far as
Embryology is concerned, and the various points which come up for
consideration in discussing his views. Darwin was the last man who would
have claimed finality for any of his doctrines, but he might fairly have
claimed to have set going a process of intellectual fermentation which
is still very far from completion.

XI. THE PALAEONTOLOGICAL RECORD. By W.B. Scott.

Professor of Geology in the University of Princeton, U.S.A.

I. ANIMALS.

To no branch of science did the publication of "The Origin of Species"
prove to be a more vivifying and transforming influence than to
Palaeontology. This science had suffered, and to some extent, still
suffers from its rather anomalous position between geology and biology,
each of which makes claim to its territory, and it was held in strict
bondage to the Linnean and Cuvierian dogma that species were immutable
entities. There is, however, reason to maintain that this strict bondage
to a dogma now abandoned, was not without its good side, and served the
purpose of keeping the infant science in leading-strings until it was
able to walk alone, and preventing a flood of premature generalisations
and speculations.

As Zittel has said: "Two directions were from the first apparent
in palaeontological research--a stratigraphical and a biological.
Stratigraphers wished from palaeontology mainly confirmation regarding
the true order or relative age of zones of rock-deposits in the field.
Biologists had, theoretically at least, the more genuine interest in
fossil organisms as individual forms of life." (Zittel, "History of
Geology and Palaeontology", page 363, London, 1901.) The geological
or stratigraphical direction of the science was given by the work of
William Smith