ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 257 



43. 



Richard 



and to discover and arrange systematically unknown 

 and extinct species, got the upper hand for a long 

 time. No one has done better work in this large 

 field than Eichard Owen, who has been termed with 

 some propriety the British Cuvier. But in following Owen, 

 the lines and filling up the schedules which Cuvier 

 had prepared, Owen and other 1 contemporary workers 

 in the same field have also had the great merit of 

 bringing the Cuvierian view to the point where it 

 clearly leads on to another and more comprehensive 

 view of nature. In the first place, it happened that 

 in finding and describing the remains of extinct animals, 

 increasing difficulty was experienced 2 in deciding to 

 which of the great existing 'groups of animals they 

 should be assigned. There arose the necessity of in- 

 terpolating species between groups which we now look 

 upon as widely separated. The necessity arose of form- 

 ing the conception of what is now termed the " inter- 



1 Huxley, loc. tit., p. 310 : " Un- 

 less it be in the ' Ossements fossiles,' 

 I do not know where one is to look 

 for contributions to palaeontology 

 more varied, more numerous, and, 

 on the whole, more accurate, than 

 those which Owen poured forth in 

 rapid succession between 1837 and 

 1888. Yet there was no lack of 

 strong contemporaries at work in 

 the same field. De Blainville's 

 ' Oste"ographie ' ; Louis Agassiz's 

 monumental work on fossil fishes, 

 achieved under the pressure of 

 great obstacles and full of brilliant 

 suggestions ; Von Meyer's long series 

 of wonderfully accurate memoirs, 

 with their admirable illustrations 

 executed by his own hands, all 

 belong to Owen's generation." 



2 See on this Cams, ' Geschichte 



VOL. II. 



der Zoologie,' p. 648, and Huxley, 

 loc. cit., p. 309, where reference is 

 made to Owen's memoir " on an ex- 

 tinct mammal discovered in South 

 America by Darwin in 1833, which 

 Owen named Taxodon Platensis. It 

 is worthy of notice that in the title 

 of this memoir there follow, after 

 the name of the species, the words 

 ' referable by its dentition to the 

 Rodentia, but with affinities to 

 the Pachydermata and the herbi- 

 vorous Cetacea ' ; indicating the 

 importance in the mind of the 

 writer of the fact that, like Cuvier's 

 Anoplotlierium and Palceotherium, 

 Taxodon occupied a position be- 

 tween groups which, in existing 

 nature, are now widely separated. 

 The existence of one more ' inter- 

 calary ' type was established." 



B 



