THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



seem to be aware of the incompatibility of the two 

 ideas. It may be doubted whether even Lyell himself 

 fully realized it. If he did, he saw no escape from the 

 dilemma, for it seemed to him that the record in the 

 rocks clearly disproved the alternative Lamarckian hy- 

 pothesis. And almost with one accord the paleontolo- 

 gists of the time sustained the verdict. Owen, Agassiz, 

 Falconer, Barrande, Pictet, Forbes, repudiated the idea 

 as unqualifiedly as their great predecessor Cuvier had 

 done in the earlier generation. Some of them did, in- 

 deed, come to believe that there is evidence of a pro- 

 gressive development of life in the successive ages, but 

 no such graded series of fossils had been discovered as 

 would give countenance to the idea that one species had 

 ever been transformed into another. And to nearly 

 every one this objection seemed insuperable. 



But now in 1859 appeared a book which, though not 

 dealing primarily with paleontology, yet contained a 

 chapter that revealed the geological record in an alto- 

 gether new light. The book was Charles Darwin's Ori- 

 gin of Species, the chapter that wonderful citation of 

 the " Imperfections of the Geological Kecord." In this 

 epoch-making chapter Darwin shows what conditions 

 must prevail in any given place in order that fossils 

 shall be formed, how unusual such conditions are, and 

 how probable it is that fossils once embedded in sedi- 

 ment of a sea-bed will be destroyed by metamorphosis 

 of the rocks, or by denudation when the strata are 

 raised above the water-level. Add to this the fact that 

 only small territories of the earth have been explored 

 geologically, he says, and it becomes clear that the 

 paleontological record as we now possess it shows but a 

 mere fragment of the past history of organisms on the 



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