THE DISCOVERER Sj 



erence was made to the two facts established by 

 palaeontology : i. That one and the same area of 

 the earth's surface has been successively occupied by 

 very different kinds of living beings ; 2. That the 

 order of succession established in one locality holds 

 good, approximately, in all. 



The inference which geologists had drawn from 

 this was that wherever rocks containing the same 

 kind of fossils are found in widely separated parts of 

 the globe, they were formed at the same time. Cor- 

 respondence in succession came to be looked upon as 

 correspondence in age. Huxley, on the other hand, 

 argued that the presence of fossils identical in type in 

 distant rock-formations pointed to an opposite con- 

 clusion. On the theory of special creation the ap- 

 pearance of the same animal remains in the same 

 order of strata in difFerent zones was explicable. But 

 on the theory of evolution considerable periods of 

 time must have elapsed to permit of the migration of 

 animals from place to place. Therefore, Huxley 

 suggested that the ambiguous and misleading term 

 "synchronism'' should be discarded in favour of the 

 term " homotaxial," as indicating that the presence 

 of certain fossils in the same relative position in the 

 succession of strata indicated a similarity of order, but 

 not an identity of date. 



In the 1869 address he discussed the interesting 



