384 GEOLOGICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 



not be impossible to indicate the source whence help will 

 come. 



In commencing these remarks, mention was made 

 of the great obligations under which the naturalist lies 

 to the geologist and paleontologist. Assuredly the time 

 will come when these obligations will be repaid tenfold, and 

 when the maze of the world's past history, through which the 

 pure geologist and the pure paleontologist find no guidance, 

 will be securely threaded by the clue furnished by the 

 naturalist. 



All who are competent to express an opinion on the 

 subject are, at present, agreed that the manifold varieties 

 of animal and vegetable form have not either come into 

 existence by chance, nor result from capricious exertions 

 of creative power ; but that they have taken place in a 

 definite order, the statement of which order is what men 

 of science term a natural law. Whether such a law is to 

 be regarded as an expression of the mode of operation of 

 natural forces, or whether it is simply a statement of the 

 manner in which a supernatural power has thought fit 

 to act, is a secondary question, so long as the existence 

 of the law and the possibility of its discovery by the human 

 intellect are granted. But he must be a half-hearted 

 philosopher who, believing in that possibility, and having 

 watched the gigantic strides of the biological sciences 

 during the last twenty years, doubts that science will 

 sooner or later make this further step, so as to become 

 possessed of the law of evolution of organic forms of 

 the unvarying order of that great chain of causes and 

 effects of which all organic forms, ancient and modern, are 

 the links. And then, if ever, we shall be able to begin 

 to discuss, with profit, the questions respecting the com- 

 mencement of life, and the nature of the successive popula- 

 tions of the globe, which so many seem to think are already 

 answered. 



The preceding arguments make no particular claim to 

 novelty ; indeed they have been floating more or less 

 distinctly before the minds of geologists for the last thirty 

 years ; and if, at the present time, it has seemed desirable 

 to give them more definite and systematic expression, it 

 is because paleontology is every day assuming a greater 

 Importance, and now requires to rest on a basis the firmness 

 of which is thoroughly well assured. Among its funda- 



