PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL PALEONTOLOGY 123 



Phylogeny evolved the fundamental biogenetic law. 

 But there are still wanting to all these theoretical 

 formulas of the transformist hypothesis the support 

 and control of real evolution; that is to say, of 

 the palceontological history of beings. Superficially 

 sketched by Darwin on data of pure descriptive 

 zoology, then by Haeckel pushing even to error 

 the exaggerations of the embryological method, 

 palceontological evolution at last became, in the last 

 thirty years of the nineteenth century, an embodied 

 doctrine, scientifically established, thanks to the 

 researches of a pleiad of specialists, such as Cope, 

 Kowalevsky, Riitimeyer, Gaudry, Waagen, Neu- 

 mayr, von Zittel, and many other more modern 

 palaeontologists. Waagen, Neumayr, and von Zittel 

 showed the importance of series of forms or mutations 

 patiently followed from strata to strata through 

 the soils of the earth's crust. Cope, more of a 

 theorist, revived a sort of neo-Lamarckism by at- 

 tributing the majority of facts in evolution to 

 conscious and unconscious physiological actions. 

 His principal theoretical formulas are those of 

 an evolution at once progressive and regressive and 

 the law of non-specialization, that is to say, the 

 arrest in development of over-specialized forms. 

 Gaudry develops, with evident exaggeration, the 

 law of the continuous progress of early beings, both 

 in their general structure and in the detail of their 

 organs, and strives to establish the stages of evolution 

 of each group at various moments of its geological 

 life ; a brilliant but no doubt delusive method, 

 which has too often led this palaeontologist into 

 error in the attempts embodied in his Enchaine- 



