HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



able monographs of special fossil faunas in the majority of 

 cases makes only the slenderest pretext of any connection 

 with recent systematic zoology; if there is a difficulty, then 

 stratigraphical arguments are made the basis of a solution. 

 Zoological students are, as a rule, too actively engaged and 

 keenly interested in building up new observations to attempt 

 to spell through the arbitrary palaeontological conclusions 

 arrived at by many stratigraphers, or to revise their labours 

 from a zoological point of view. 



Until the sixth decade of the nineteenth century the 

 exact description of genera and species received the chief 

 attention in the literature both of zoology and stratigraphical 

 palaeontology. The individual faunas and floras of the past 

 time were regarded by the adherents of the Catastrophal 

 Theory as creations quite distinct from one another, whose 

 order of succession and whose mutual relations it was the 

 first duty of stratigraphy and palaeontology to determine. In 

 a prize essay of the Paris Academy, entitled " Investigations of 

 the developmental laws of the organic world during the period 

 of formation of our Earth's Surface" (Stuttgart, 1858), H. G. 

 Bronn has supplied a valuable compendium of all the known 

 palaeontological material and the distribution of the fossils in 

 the different strata. 



In this work Bronn criticises unfavourably the theories of 

 creation and development advanced by Lamarck, GeofTroy 

 Saint-Hilaire, Oken, Grant, and others. He admits that 

 modifications of organic forms may produce racial distinctions, 

 but regards as fallacious, or at least wholly hypothetical, the 

 generatio cequivoca, the gradual modification of species, the 

 descent of all younger forms from older, as well as the evolu- 

 tion of more highly-perfected organisms from those on a lower 

 platform of organisation. He assumes a creative force which 

 not only brought forth the first organisms, but had continued 

 during subsequent geological epochs to the present age, and 

 had worked independently of chance circumstances and accord- 

 ing to a definite plan. The unity of this plan was the basis 

 of the apparent relationships between the types of successive 

 creations ; as certain types became extinct, others were created 

 of similar but more perfect design to replace the gap in the 

 organic world. Thus, by repeated substitutions, as Sedgwick, 

 Hugh Miller, Brongniart, and Agassiz had already advocated, 

 Bronn tries to explain the universal tendency in animate 



