of the Germans.

IX.

PALAEONTOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

(THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS TO THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, FOR 1870.)

It is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard
Homer, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the
Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address.
I availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to "take stock"
of that portion of the science of biology which is commonly called
"palaeontology," as it then existed; and, discussing one after another
the doctrines held by palaeontologists, I put before you the results
of my attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or
the doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those
results were:--

1. The living population of all parts of the earth's surface which
have yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes which,
upon the whole, have been of a slow and gradual character.

2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these successive
changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less distant parts
of the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit a certain
broad and general parallelism. In other words, certain forms of life
in one locality occur in the same general order of succession as, or
are _homotaxial_ with, similar forms in the other locality.

3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism without
independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even identical,
faunae and florae in two different localities may be of extremely
different ages, if the term "age" is used in its proper chronological
sense. I stated that "geographical provinces, or zones, may have been
as distinctly marked in the Palaeozoic epoch as at present; and those
seemingly sudden appearances of new genera and species, which we
ascribe to new creation, may be simple results of migration."

4. The opinion that the oldest known fossils are the earliest forms of
life has no solid foundation.

5. If we confine ourselves to positively ascertained facts, the total
amount of change in the forms of animal and vegetable life, since the
existence of such forms is recorded, is small. When compared with the
lapse of time since the first appearance of these forms, the amount
of change is wonderfully small. Moreover, in each great group of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms, there are certain forms which I termed
PERSISTENT TYPES, which