THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



Australia and then discuss the number and range of its 

 productions." 



This citation of observations, which when once point- 

 ed out seemed almost self-evident, came as a revelation 

 to the geological world. In the clarified view now pos- 

 sible old facts took on a new meaning. It was recalled 

 that Cuvier had been obliged to establish a new order 

 for some of the first fossil creatures he examined, and 

 that Buckland had noted that the nondescript forms were 

 intermediate in structure between allied existing orders. 

 More recently such intermediate forms had been discov- 

 ered over and over; so that, to name but one example, 

 Owen had been able, with the aid of extinct species, to 

 "dissolve by gradations the apparently wide interval 

 between the pig and the camel." Owen, moreover, had 

 been led to speak repeatedly of the " generalized forms '' 

 of extinct animals, and Agassiz had called them " syn- 

 thetic or prophetic types," these terms clearly implying 

 " that such forms are in fact intermediate or connecting 

 links." Darwin himself had shown some years before 

 that the fossil animals of any continent are closely re- 

 lated to the existing animals of that continent eden- 

 tates predominating, for example, in South America, 

 and marsupials in Australia. Many observers had noted 

 that recent strata everywhere show a fossil fauna more 

 nearly like the existing one than do more ancient strata; 

 and that fossils from any two consecutive strata are far 

 more closely related to each other than are the fossils 

 of two remote formations, the fauna of each geological 

 formation being, indeed, in a wide view, intermediate 

 between preceding and succeeding faunas. 



So suggestive were all these observations that Lyell, 

 the admitted leader of the geological world, after read- 



107 



