PRESENT PROBLEMS 569 



gested the phrase, Non paleontologia sine geologia. With other phy- 

 sical sciences paleontology is hardly less intimate; from the physicist 

 it demands time for the evolution of successive waves of organisms, 

 from the geographer it demands continental connections or even 

 whole continents for the passage of land-animals and plants. As with 

 geology, what it receives it is ever ready to return in gifts; the new 

 branch of geography, for example, entitled paleogeography, appeals 

 quite as often to the paleontologist as to the geologist for its data. 



Problem of the Origin of Fitness 



Naturally the central thought of paleontology as biology is the 

 origin of fitness as the property which above all others distinguishes 

 the living from the non-living. Here the paleontologist enjoys the 

 peculiar advantage of being present at the birth of new characters and 

 watching the course of their development; and to this advantage is 

 attached the peculiar responsibility of observing the birth and course 

 of development of such characters with the utmost accuracy and a 

 mind free from prejudices in favor of any particular hypothesis, with 

 full acquaintance with the phenomena of evolution as they present 

 themselves to the zoologist, the botanist, and the experimentalist, and 

 with the philosophical temper which will put every hypothesis to the 

 test of every fact. The laughing remark of Cope on seeing a newly dis- 

 covered specimen which controverted one of his hypotheses, "If no one 

 were watching I should be glad to throw that fossil out of the window," 

 has a serious reality in our often unconscious protection of our own 

 opinions. 



The birth of new characters is the crucial point in the origin of 

 fitness. With Darwin " himself, with Cope, 2 with Bateson, 3 we do not 

 regard the Darwinian law of selection as the creative or birth-factor; 

 by its very terms it operates after there is something of value to select. 

 Forgetting this distinction, some naturalists are so blind as to fail to 

 see that selection is still the supreme factor in evolution in the sense 

 that it produces the most grand and sweeping results as well as the 

 most inconspicuous results in the organic world. Certain of the cre- 

 ative factors cannot be seen at all by paleontologists; others, in my 

 opinion, cannot be seen by zoologists. 



Before looking farther into the creation of fitness, let us clear away 

 another misconception which happens to be of paleontological origin, 

 although paleontologists are not responsible for it. It concerns the his- 



1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859; The Variation of Animals and 

 Plants under Domestication, 1868. 



2 E. D. Cope, The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, Chicago, 1896; The 

 Origin of the Fittest, 8vo, New York, 1887. 



3 Wm. Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation, London and New York, 

 1894. 



