PRESENT PROBLEMS OF PALEONTOLOGY. 229 



paleontologia sine geologic. With other physical sciences paleontology 

 is hardly less intimate; from the physicist it demands time for the evo- 

 lution 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 them- 

 selves 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, with Bateson, 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 

 creative factors can not be seen at all by paleontologists ; others, in my 

 opinion, can not be seen by zoologists. 



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

 another misconception, which happens to be of paleo'ntological origin, 

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

 tory of one of the great theories of the day. Many years ago, Waagen, 

 a German paleontologist, observed that the varieties or minor changes 

 in time (chronological varieties) differ from varieties in space (geo- 

 graphical varieties) ; that the latter have a variable value and are of 

 small systematic importance, while the former are very constant and. 



