THE FUTURE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



By Joseph. A. Cushman 



In these days the man of science holds an enviable position. His 

 outlook on the world in general, so far as his scientific point of view is 

 concerned, is not dimmed by the terrors of war, by changing political 

 trends, nor by recessions of the business world. True, all of these 

 may limit his productivity or actually interfere with his work. Never- 

 theless, he has a grasp on the laws of the universe which are unaffected 

 by any of these changing conditions. He needs no appeal to a court, 

 for the laws with which he deals are the eternal verities. So in the 

 shifting sands of the human world and the ebb and flow of man-made 

 tides he may feel sure of the ground on which his science is based, 

 knowing that its laws will be operating when all these other temporary 

 troubles are long forgotten. 



To the astronomer who deals with the whole universe and whose 

 time basis is one of light-years, such trivialities as the rise and fall of 

 dynasties or the wars of races on this small planet of ours are of little 

 consequence when he looks out upon ordered worlds each true to its 

 own pathway through space. So, too, other sciences are based upon 

 less broad a field, but their vastness is such that one may at least 

 temporarily broaden his outlook from the world about him and turn 

 back the records of time to other worlds long passed away. 



To the paleontologist is given a rare privilege, for his is the steward- 

 ship of the oldest book of records that we possess, the book which con- 

 tains all that we know of the progress of life upon this planet of ours. 

 True, the book has had very hard usage and is imperfect. Many of 

 its pages are badly torn and blotted; others have later records written 

 across a page of earlier ones, so that it is difficult to trace the written 

 lines. Many of its pages are entirely missing. Nevertheless, this is 

 the only record of the past life of the world and as such is beyond price. 



Given into his hands, it is the sacred duty of the paleontologist to 

 study the pages with the utmost care, to translate the hidden meanings, 

 to fill in to the best of his ability the blurred lines, and, wherever 

 possible, to replace the missing pages. 



» Address as retiring president of the Paleontological Society, 1937. Reprinted by permission from the 

 Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. 49, pp. 359-366, March 1, 1938. 



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