SCIENCE OF FOSSIL LIFE 335 



in the development of higher forms of recent animals is 

 very interesting and very significant, and helps materially 

 in elucidating the idea that the fossil series represent roughly 

 the successive stages through which animal forms have 

 passed in their upward course of development from the 

 simplest to the highest, through long ages of time. Curi- 

 ously enough, however, Agassiz failed to grasp the meaning 

 of the principle that he had worked out. After illustrating 

 so nicely the process of organic evolution, he remained to the 

 end of his life an opponent of that theory. 



Huxley. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was led 

 to study fossil life on an extended scale, and he shed light in 

 this province as in others upon which he touched. With crit- 

 ical analysis and impartial mind he applied the principles 

 of evolution to the study of fossil remains. His first conclu- 



^ 



sion was that the evidence of evolution derived from palaeon- 

 tology was negative, but with the advances in discovery he 

 grew gradually to recognize that palaeontologists, in bringing 

 to light complete evolutionary series, had supplied some of 

 the strongest supporting evidence of organic evolution. By 

 many geologists fossils have been used as time-markers for 

 the determination of the age of various deposits; but, with 

 Huxley, the study of them was always biological. It is to 



r / f f 



the latter point of view that palaeontology owes its great 

 importance and its great development. The statement of 

 Huxley, that the only difference between a fossil and a recent 

 animal is that one has been dead longer than the other, 

 represents the spirit in which the study is being carried 

 forward. 



With the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolu- 

 tion palaeontology entered upon its modern phase of growth; 

 upon this basis there is being reared a worthy structure 

 through the efforts of the recent votaries to the science. It 

 is neither essential nor desirable that the present history of 



