836 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the idea of an origin from fishes or reptiles. He thinks the ancestors 

 of the whales must have been quadrupedal mammals. He is obliged, 

 for good reasons, to reject the seals and the otters, and turns to the 

 ungulates, though here, also, the difficulties are formidable. Finally 

 he has recourse to an imaginary ancestor, supposed to have haunted 

 marshes and rivers of the mesozoic age and to have been intermediate 

 between a hippopotamus and a dolphin, and omnivorous in diet. As 

 this animal is altogether unknown to geology or zoology, and not 

 much less difficult to account for than the whales themselves, he very 

 properly adds, "Please to recollect, however, that this is a mere specu- 

 lation. " He trusts, however, that such speculations are " not without 

 their use " ; but this will depend upon whether or not they lead men's 

 minds from the path of legitimate science into the quicksands of base- 

 less conjecture. 



Gaudry, in his recent work, " Enchainements du Monde Animal,"* 

 though a strong advocate of evolution, is obliged in his final resume 

 to say : " II ne laisse point percer le mystere qui entoure le developpe- 

 ment primitif des grandes classes du monde animal. Nul homme ne 

 sait comment ont ete formes les premiers individus de foraminiferes, 

 de polypes, d'etoiles de mer, de crinoides, etc. Les fossiles primaires 

 ne nous ont pas encore fourni de preuves positives du passage des 

 animaux d'une classe a ceux d'une autre classe." 



Professor Williamson, of Manchester, in an address delivered in 

 February last before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, after 

 showing that the conifers, ferns, and lycopods of the palaeozoic have 

 no known ancestry, uses the significant words, " The time has not yet 

 arrived for the appointment of a botanical king-at-arms and con- 

 structor of pedigrees." 



Another caution which a paleontologist has occasion to give with 

 regard to theories of life has reference to the tendency of biologists 

 to infer that animals and plants were introduced under embryonic 

 forms, and at first in few and imperfect species. Facts do not sub- 

 stantiate this. The first appearance of leading types of life is rarely 

 embryonic. On the contrary, they often appear in highly perfect and 

 specialized forms ; often, however, of composite type, and expressing 

 characters afterward so separated as to belong to higher groups. The 

 trilobites of the Cambrian are some of them of few segments, and, so 

 far, embryonic ; but the greater part are many-segmented and very 

 complex. The batrachians of the carboniferous present many charac- 

 ters higher than those of their modern successors, and now appropri- 

 ated to the true reptiles. The reptiles of the Permian and trias 

 usurped some of the prerogatives of the mammals. The ferns, lyco- 

 pods, and equisetums of the Devonian and carboniferous were, to say 

 the least, not inferior to their modern representatives. The shell- 

 bearing cephalopods] of the palaeozoic would seem to have possessed 



* Paris, 1883. 



