254 LOUIS AGASSIZ. 



I have given this long quotation, because it shows clearly the elevated 

 philosophical and religious point of view from which Agassiz regarded 

 the history of creation. 



It is seen by the examples given what importance he attached to pa- 

 leontology. He endeavored to show that from the ancient geological 

 periods the number and diversity of animated beings was as great as it 

 is to-day. Certain rocks are formed entirely of the debris of organized 

 beings. The coral reefs of the tertiary, secondary, and even primary 

 periods are in no wise inferior to the present reefs.* The coal-beds of 

 the carboniferous period exhibit a vegetation richer than our tropical 

 flora. These myriads of beings which have ceased to exist he regarded 

 as the manifestation of the divine thought, which regulated their mode 

 of appearance and succession. '' There were at various intervals during 

 the successive geological ages i>eriods of creation, all the species of ani- 

 mals and of plants created at each i^eriod having lasted for a given time 

 in order to be replaced successively by others." The present creation is, 

 according to his view, one of these phases, and he believed that all the 

 animals in it api^eared simultaneously. 



Agassiz always remained faithful to this theory, which had many ad- 

 herents at the time he advocated it. Science has made great advances 

 since that jieriod. The progress of paleontology, to which he contrib- 

 uted so largely, as well as that of zoological and botanical geography, 

 demonstrates by the fullest evidence that the animated world which 

 l)eoples the surface of the globe could not have issued complete and 

 simultaneously from the hands of the Creator, for in the midst of new 

 types there exist offshoots from numerous groups, whose great develop- 

 ment took i^lace in the anterior geological periods, while other types 

 have acquired in the present epoch a force and extension they never had 

 before, although their successive increase was indicated in the later 

 geological periods. The present ferns are only the representatives, 

 greatly diminished in size, of tliat large group of Cryi)togams which at 

 the carboniferous period clothed the entire world with their colossal veg- 

 etation, and which since then have been constantly diminishing. 



The traveler who encounters isolated in the mountains of China the 

 singular conifer called the Ginho hiloha will not hesitate to consider this 

 type, unique in the present creation, as the last descendant of the Ginho 

 which, at the secondary period, covered with a great number of species 

 all the ancient continent. The zoologist who finds in the rivers of 

 Australia the Lepidosteus osseus, the last representative not only of a 

 genus but of an entire order of fishes, that of the Ganoids, cannot fail to 

 recognize in this type the remains of an extinct race. The Marsupials 

 of the same country, the Edentates of South America, and a hundred 

 other examples furnish us to day- with the i)roof that the actual world 

 is only the regular normal continuation of anterior periods. In spite of 

 the embryological theories of which Agassiz was the author, and which it 



'American Journal of Science, 1854, vol. xvii, pp. 309-324. 



