XI 



THE PALAEONTOLOGICAL RECORD 



I. ANIMALS 



By W. B. Scott. 



Professor of Geology in the University of Princeton, U.S.A. 



To no branch of science did the publication of The Origin of 

 Species prove to be a more vivifying and transforming influence than 

 to Palaeontology. This science had suffered, and to some extent, still 

 suffers from its rather anomalous position between geology and 

 biology, each of which makes claim to its territory, and it was held 

 in strict bondage to the Linnean and Cuvierian dogma that species 

 were immutable entities. There is, however, reason to maintain that 

 this strict bondage to a dogma now abandoned, was not without its 

 good side, and served the purpose of keeping the infant science in 

 leading-strings until it was able to walk alone, and preventing a flood 

 of premature generalisations and speculations. 



As Zittel has said : " Two directions were from the first apparent 

 in palaeontological research — a stratigraphical and a biological. 

 Stratigraphers wished from palaeontology mainly confirmation re- 

 garding the true order or relative age of zones of rock-deposits 

 in the field. Biologists had, theoretically at least, the more genuine 

 interest in fossil organisms as individual forms of life 1 ." The geo- 

 logical or stratigraphical direction of the science was given by the 

 work of William Smith, "the father of historical geology," in the 

 closing decade of the eighteenth century. Smith was the first to 

 make a systematic use of fossils in determining the order of suc- 

 cession of the rocks which make up the accessible crust of the earth, 

 and this use has continued, without essential change, to the present 

 day. It is true that the theory of evolution has greatly modified our 

 conceptions concerning the introduction of new species and the 

 manner in which palaeontological data are to be interpreted in terms 

 of stratigraphy, but, broadly speaking, the method remains funda- 

 mentally the same as that introduced by Smith. 



The biological direction of palaeontology was due to Cuvier and 

 his associates, who first showed that fossils were not merely varieties 



1 Zittel, History of Geology and Valacontology, p. 3(53, London, 1901. 



