Professor Owen on British Fossil If ep tiles, 7& 



ganized beings coexisting with them, and chai'acterizing the 

 same strata, but now equally extinct with their devourers. 



To what natural or secondary cause, it may then be asked, 

 can the successive genera and species of reptiles be attributed ? 

 Does the hypothesis of the transmutation of species, by a 

 march of development occasioning a progressive ascent in the 

 organic scale, afford any explanation of these surprising pheno- 

 mena? Do the speculations of Maillet, Lamarck, and Geof- 

 frey, derive any support, or meet with any additional disproof, 

 from the facts already determined in the reptilian department 

 of palaeontology 1 



A slight survey of organic remains may, indeed, appear to 

 support their views of the origin of animated species ; but of no 

 stream of science is it more necessary, than of palaeontology, 

 '' to drink deep or taste not."* 



Of all vertebrated animals, the reptiles form the class which 

 is least fixed in its characters, and is most transitional in its 

 range of modifications ; the lowest organized species are hardly 

 distinguishable from fishes, and the highest manifest so great 

 an advance in all the important systems of their organism, that 

 naturalists are not yet agreed as to whether reptiles ought to 

 remain in one class or form two. Reptiles are, besides, the 

 only class of vertebrate animals in which certain species un- 

 dergo, after birth, a metamorphosis as singular and extreme 

 as in insects. 



If the progressive development of animal organization ever 

 extended beyond the acquisition of the mature characters of 



* The following are the latest terms in which the transmutation tlieory 

 has been promulgated, as supported by palaeontology : — " The life of animals 

 exliibits a continued series of changes, which occupy so short a period, that 

 we can generally trace their entire order of succession, and perceive the 

 whole change of their metamorphoses. But the metamorphoses of species 

 proceed so slowly with regard to us, that we can neither perceive their ori- 

 gin, their maturity, nor their decay ; and we ascribe to them a kind of perpe- 

 tuity on the earth. A slight inspection of the organic relics deposited in the 

 crust of the globe, shews that the forms of species, and the whole zoology of 

 our planet, have been constantly changing ; and that the organic kingdoms, 

 like the surface they inhabit, have been gradually developed from a simpler 

 state to their present condition.'" Dr Grant's Lectures on Comparative Ana- 

 iomy.^Lancet, 1835, p. 1001. 



