A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



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 

 earth. It is a history " imperfectly kept and written in 

 a changing dialect. Of this history we possess the last 

 volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. 

 Of this volume only here and there a short chapter has 

 been preserved, and of each page only here and there a 

 few lines." For a paleontologist to dogmatize from 

 such a record would be as rash, he thinks, as " for a nat- 

 uralist to land for five minutes on a barren point of 

 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 revela- 

 tion to the geological world. In the clarified view now 

 possible old facts took on a new meaning. It was re- 

 called 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 ex- 

 isting orders. More recently such intermediate forms 

 had been discovered 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 appar- 

 ently 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 "synthetic or prophetic types," these 

 terms clearly implying " that such forms are in fact in- 

 termediate or connecting links." Darwin himself had 



96 



