Alcide d'Orhigny. 71 



XV. — The Verdict of Posterity. 



Apart from the observations of some of his rivals upon contro- 

 versial points in the teaching of d'Orbigny, and apart from 

 Deshayes (see ante, p. 30), the first writer who set himself seriously 

 to criticize d'Orbigny's classification and general method was the 

 late W. B. Carpenter, in his " Introduction to the Study of the 

 Foraminifera," published in 1862. It is hardly too much to say 

 that whenever occasion serves, Carpenter's criticism takes on the 

 nature of an attack, an attack the force of which is not infrequently 

 neutralized by being founded upon an insufficient or superficial 

 equipment for the purpose. 



The first work of Carpenter on the Foraminifera was published 

 in 1849,^ and after this came a series of specialized Memoirs in 

 the " Philosophical Transactions of the Koyal Society," and it was 

 these elaborate and laborious researches into the minute structure 

 and affinities of the Foraminiferal shell which clearly demon- 

 strated the hopeless futility from a zoological point of view of the 

 arbitrary classification of d'Orbigny. Carpenter tells us him- 

 self, " When, some years since 1 undertook to prepare for the 

 Pay Society an outline view of the structure, physiology, and 

 systematic arrangement of the Foraminifera generally, 1 had no 

 idea of contributing anything else than an Introduction to my 

 friend Professor W. C. Williamson's ' Eecent Foraminifera of Great 

 Britain.' - With the progress of my own researches, however, I 

 came more and more strongly to feel how unsatisfactorv are the 

 results of the method pursued by M. d'Orbigny and by those who 

 have followed his lead, both as regards the multiplication of species, 

 the distinction of genera, and the grouping of these genera into 

 families and orders." ^ At the same time it must be borne in 

 mind that the minute structure and consequential affinities of the 

 Foraminifera had already engaged the attention of Williamson, 

 and the conclusions of Carpenter were adumbrated by him in his 

 first published papers on the genus Lagena and upon the micro- 

 scopic structure of Polystomella.* 



Carpenter, however, was the first to voice the conclusion, which 

 must have been forcing itself before his day upon Ehizopodists — 

 that " shavply defined divisions, whether between species, genera, 



' W. B. Carpenter, " Ou the Microscopic Structure of Nummulina, Orbitolites, 

 and Orbitoides," Q. J. Geol. Soc, vi. (1850), pp. 21-39, pis. iii.-viii. 



- Published by the Ray Society in 1858. 



= XVII., p. V. 



'' W. C.Williamson, " Ou the Recent British Species of the Genus Lagena," 

 Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., ser. 2, i. (1848) pp. 1-20, pis. i.-ii. ; and " On the Structure of 

 the Shell and Soft Animal of Polystomella crispa," etc., Trans. Micr. Soc. London, 

 ii. (1849) pp. 159-178, pi. xxviii. 



