listed in scientific books; but they are all acknowledged now
to be identical with the modern grizzly, and as we have already
intimated all the modern ones ought to be put together. These modern
rationalizing methods have made but a slight impression on the vast
complex of the fossil plants and animals, affecting the names of only a
few of the larger and better known forms. In the realm of invertebrate
palaeontology, however, the "splitters" are still holding high carnival,
in spite of the efforts of some very prominent scientists in the
opposite direction. For palaeontologists still follow the irrational
course of inventing a new name, specific or even generic, for a form
that happens to be found in a kind of rock widely separated as to "age"
from the other beds where similar forms are accustomed to be found. As
Angelo Heilprin expresses it, "It is practically certain that numerous
forms of life, exhibiting no distinctive characters of their own, are
constituted into distinct species _for no other reason than that they
occur in formations widely separated from those holding their nearest
kin_."[17]

As a result of these methods this same author declares: "It is by no
means improbable that many of the older _genera_, now recognized as
distinct by reason of our imperfect knowledge concerning their true
relationships, have in reality representatives living in the modern
seas."[18]

[Footnote 17: "Geographical and Geological Distribution of Animals," pp.
183, 184.]

[Footnote 18: _Id_., pp. 207, 208.]

But the situation is very little better when we come to deal with plants
and animals of our modern world. Because, with the many thousands of
students of natural science all over the world, each anxious to get into
print as the discoverer of some new form, the systematists have a dead
weight of names on their hands that by a rational and enlightened
revision could doubtless be reduced to but a fraction of their present
disheartening array. For as the result of the extensive breeding
experiments now being carried on under the study of what is called
Mendelism (a term that will be explained in the next chapter), it has
been found that great numbers of the "species" of the systematists or
classificationists will not stand the physiological test of breeding,
that is, they are found to breed freely together according to the
Mendelian Law. As William Bateson remarks:

"We may even be certain that numbers of excellent specie