NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



The fresh controversy followed quite as a matter of 

 course. For the idea of catastrophism had not con- 

 cerned the destruction of species merely, but their 

 introduction as well. If whole faunas had been extir- 

 pated suddenly, new faunas had presumably been in- 

 troduced with equal suddenness by special creation; 

 but if species die out gradually, the introduction of new 

 species may be presumed to be correspondingly grad- 

 ual. Then may not the new species of a later geolog- 

 ical epoch be the modified lineal descendants of the 

 extinct population of an earlier epoch ? 



The idea that such might be the case was not new. 

 It had been suggested when fossils first began to attract 

 conspicuous attention; and such sagacious thinkers as 

 Buffon and Kant and Goethe and Erasmus Darwin had 

 been disposed to accept it in the closing days of the 

 eighteenth century. Then, in 1809, it had been con- 

 tended for by one of the early workers in systematic 

 paleontology Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who had studied 

 the fossil shells about Paris while Cuvier studied the 

 vertebrates, and who had been led by these studies to 

 conclude that there had been not merely a rotation but 

 a progression of life on the globe. He found the fossil 

 shells the fossils of invertebrates, as he himself had 

 christened them in deeper strata than Cuvier's verte- 

 brates; and he believed that there had been long ages 

 when no higher forms than these were in existence, and 

 that in successive ages fishes, and then reptiles, had 

 been the highest of animate creatures, before mammals, 

 including man, appeared. Looking beyond the pale of 



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