420 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
number of fossils to support and establish it on a solid basis, and he 
should have taken into consideration this important law laid down 
by Geoffroy St. Hilaire: “ The embryological development of a liv- 
ing being is an abbreviated résumé of the phases through which has 
passed the paleontological development with which any given species 
is related.” 
III, DARWIN. 
Forty years later Darwin, taking up the ideas of Lamarck, gave 
to the transformation theory such éclat that many scholars hence- 
forth called it the theory of Darwinism. 
Darwin, who had traveled much, and, in consequence, had seen 
much; who had a prodigious gift of observation, and was possessed 
of vast erudition, added another important argument to the theory 
of transformism—that of vital competition. 
According to this great English scholar, there was produced, in 
consequence of this competition among living forms, a “natural 
selection” analogous to the artificial selection employed by man in 
the production of varieties in the vegetal world and in the animal 
world. The best endowed species survived, but disappeared, in 
turn, before species better organized. 
An exposition and discussion of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” 
need not be made here. It is known to everyone. But it is necessary 
to note and set forth the great feebleness of the paleontological argu- 
ments of Darwin, arguments which, however, ought to constitute 
the basis of the whole theory of transformation, because there ought 
to be an inseparable bond between paleontology and zoology. It is 
Albert Gaudry, the rival and contemporary of Darwin, who offered 
him this indispensable support. 
IV. THE WORK OF ALBERT GAUDRY. 
Born in 1827 at St. Germain-en-Laye, Albert Gaudry was the son 
of the president of the order of barristers of Paris, an intelligent 
amateur of the natural sciences. At the age of 20 the young man, 
who, with his father, had traveled about the environs of Paris and 
had visited the principal deposits of fossils described by Cuvier, 
showed an irresistible liking for geology and paleontology. In 1850 
he was attached to the geological laboratory of the Museum of Nat- 
ural History, where he labored under the direction of d’Orbigny, his 
brother-in-law, and Cordier. In 1852 his first works “On a group 
of Echinoderms (Stelleride)” and “On the origin and formation 
of flints of the chalk and of the millstones of the Tertiary forma- 
tions” gave him the title of doctor. 
