376 GEOLOGICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 



made to feed canals " ; and geology, some seem to think, 

 was solely created to advance comparative anatomy. 



Were such a thought justifiable, it could hardly expect 

 to be received with favour by this assembly. But it is 

 not justifiable. Your favourite science has her own great 

 aims independent of all others ; and if, notwithstanding 

 her steady devotion to her own progress, she can scatter 

 such rich alms among her sisters, it should be remembered 

 that her charity is of the sort that does not impoverish, 

 but " blesseth him that gives and him that takes.'* 



Regard the matter as we will, however, the facts remain. 

 Nearly 40,000 species of animals and plants have been 

 added to the Systema Naturae by paleontological research. 

 This is a living population equivalent to that of a new 

 continent in mere number ; equivalent to that of a new 

 hemisphere, if we take into account the small population of 

 insects as yet found fossil, and the large proportion and 

 peculiar organization of many of the Vertebrata. 



But, beyond this, it is perhaps not too much to say that, 

 except for the necessity of interpreting paleontological 

 facts, the laws of distribution would have received less 

 careful study ; while few comparative anatomists (and 

 those not of the first order) would have been induced by 

 mere love of detail, as such, to study the minutiae of oste- 

 ology, were if not that in such minutiae lie the only keys to 

 the most interesting riddles offered by the extinct animal 

 world. 



These assuredly are great and solid gains. Surely it is 

 matter for no small congratulation that in half a century 

 (for paleontology, though it dawned earlier, came into 

 full day only with Cuvier) a subordinate branch of biology 

 should have doubled the value and the interest of the whole 

 group of sciences to which it belongs. 



But this is not all. Allied with geology, paleontology 

 has established two laws of inestimable importance : the 

 first, that one and the same area of the earth's surface has 

 been successively occupied by very different kinds of living 

 beings ; the second, that the order of succession established 

 in one locality holds good, approximately, in all. 



The first of these laws is universal and irreversible ; the 

 second is an induction from a vast number of observations, 

 though it may possibly, and even probably, have to admit 

 of exceptions. As a consequence of the second law, it 

 follows that a peculiar relation frequently subsists between 



