452 



NA TURE 



{Sept. 8, 1 88 1 



It would greatly add to the utility of the Faure battery if its 

 weight and size could be considerably reduced, for in that case it 

 might be applicable to many purposes of locomotion. We may 

 easily conceive its becoming available in a lighter form for all 

 sorts of carriajjes on common roads, thereby saving to a va'-t 

 extent the labour of horses. Even the nobler animal that strides 

 a bicycle, or the one of fainter courage that prefers the safer 

 seat of a tricycle, may ere long be spared the labour of propul- 

 sion, and the time may not be distant when an electric horse, 

 far more amenable to discipline than the living one, may be 

 added to the bounteous gifts which science has bestowed on 

 civilised man. 



In conclusion I may observe that we can scarcely sufficiently 

 admire the profound investigations which have revealed to us 

 the strict dynamical relation of heat and electricity to outward 

 mechanical motion. It would be a delicate task to apportion 

 praise amongst those whose labours have contributed, in various 

 degrees, to our present knowledge ; but I shall do no injustice 

 in saying that of those who have expountled the modern doctrine 

 of energy, in special relation to mechanical practice, the names 

 of Joule, Clausius, Rankine, and William Thomson, will 

 always be conspicuous. But up to this time our knowledge of 

 energy is almost confined to its inorganic aspect. Of its physio- 

 logical action we remain in deep ignorance, and as we may 

 expect to derive much valuable guidance from a knowledge of 

 Nature's methods of dealing with energy in her wondrous 

 mechanisms, it is to be hoped that future research will be 

 directed to the elucidation of that branch of science which as 

 yet has not even a name, but which I may provisionally term 

 "Animal Energetics." 



THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF 

 PAL^EONTOLOG Y^ 

 T^HAT application of the sciences of biology and geology 

 -^ which is commonly known as paleontology took its origin 

 in the mind of the first person who, finding something like a 

 shell or a bone naturally imbedded in gravel or in rock, indulged 

 in speculations upon the nature of this thing which he had dug 

 out — this "fossil" — and upon the causes which had brought it 

 into such a position. In this rudimentary form, a high antiquity 

 may safely be ascribed to pala;ontology, inasmuch as we know that, 

 Soo years before the Christian era, the jihilosophic doctrines of 

 Xenophanes were influenced by his observations upon the fossil 

 remains exposed in the quarries of Syracuse. From this time 

 forth, not only the philosophers, but the poets, the historians, 

 the geogi-aphers of antiquity occasionally refer to fossils ; and 

 after the revival of learning lively controversies arose respecting 

 their real nature. But hardly more than two centuries have 

 elapsed since this fundamental problem was first exhaustively 

 treated ; it was only in the last century that the archaeological 

 value of fossils — their importance, I mean, as records of the 

 history of the earth — was fully recognised ; the first adequate 

 investigation of the fossil remains of any large group of verte- 

 brated animals is to be found in Cuvier's " Kecherches sur les 

 Ossemens Fossiles," completed in 1822 ; and, so modern is 

 stratigraphical paleontology, that its founder, William Smith, 

 lived to receive the just recognition of his services by the award 

 of the first Wollaston Medal in 1831. 



But, although palseontology is a comparatively youthful scien- 

 tific speciality, the mass of materials with which it has to deal is 

 already prodigious. In the last fifty years the number of known 

 fossil remains of invertebrated animals has been trebled or 

 quadrupled. The work of interpretation of vertel>rate fossils, 

 the foundations of which were so solidly laid by Cuvier, was 

 carried on, with wonderful vigour and success, by Agassiz, in 

 Switzerland, by Von Meyer, in Germany, and last, but not least, 

 by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a multitude of 

 workers have laboured in the same field. In many groups of the 

 animal kingdom the number of fossil forms already known is as 

 great as that of the existing species. In some cases it is much 

 greater ; and there are entire orders of animals of the existence 

 of which we should know nothing except for the evidence 

 afforded by fossil remains. With all this it may be safely 

 assumed that, at the present moment, we are not acquainted 

 with a tithe of the fossils which will sooner or later be discovered. 

 If we may judge by the profusion yielded within the last few 

 years by the Tertiary formations of North America, there seems 



* Discourse given at the York meeting of the British Association by Prof. 

 T. H. Huxley. Sec. R. S. Revised by the author. 



to be no limit to the multitude of Mammalian remains to be 

 expected from that continent, and analogy leads us to expect 

 similar riches in Eastern Asia whenever the Tertiary formations 

 of that region .are as carefully explored. Again, we have as yet 

 almost everything to learn respecting the terrestrial population 

 of the Mesozoic epoch — and it seems as if the Western Territories 

 of the United States were about to prove as instructive in regard 

 to this point as they have in respect of Tertiary life. My friend 

 Prof. Marsh informs me that, within two years, remains of more 

 than 160 distinct individuals of mammals, belonging to twenty 

 species and nine genera, have been found in a space not 

 larger than the floor of a good-sized room ; while beds of the 

 same age have yielded 300 reptiles, vailing in size from a length 

 of 60 feet or So feet to the dimensions of a rabbit. 



The task which I have set myself to-night is to endeavour to 

 lay before you, as briefly as possible, a sketch of the successive 

 steps by which our present knowledge of the facts of palceontology 

 and of those conclusions from them which are indisputable has 

 been attained ; and I beg leave to remind you, at the outset, 

 th.at in attempting to sketch the progress of a branch of know- 

 ledge to which innumerable labours have contributed, my 

 business is rather with generalisations than with details. It is 

 my object to mark the epochs of palaeontology, not to recount 

 all the events of its history. 



That which I just now called the fundamental problem of 

 paleontology, the question which has to be settled before any 

 other can be profitably discussed, is this, — What is the nature of 

 fossils ? Are they, as the healthy common sense of the ancient 

 Greeks appears to have led them to assume without hesitation, 

 the remains of animals an I plants? Or are they, as was so 

 generally maintained in the fifteenth, .sixteenth, and seventeenth 

 centuries, mere figured stones, portions of mineral matter which 

 have assumed the forms of leaves and shells and bones, just as 

 those portions of mineral matter v hich we call crystals take on 

 the fonii of regular geometrical solids? Or, again, are they, as 

 others thought, the products of the germs of animals and of the 

 seeds of plants which have lost their way, as it were, in the 

 bowels of the earth, and have achieved only an imperfect and 

 abortive development ? It is easy to sneer at our ancestors for 

 being disposed to reject the first in favour of one or other of the 

 last two hypotheses ; but it is much more profitable to try to 

 discover why they, « ho were really not one whit less sensible 

 persons than our excellent selves, should have been led to 

 entertain views which strike us as absurd. The belief in what 

 is erroneously called spontaneous generation — that is to say, in 

 the development of living matter out of mineral matter, apart 

 from the agency of pre-existing living matter, as an ordinary 

 occurrence at the present day — which is still held by some of us, 

 was universally accepted as an obvious truth by them. They 

 could point to the arborescent forms assumed by hoar-frost and 

 by sundry metallic minerals as evidence of the existence in 

 nature of a " plastic force " competent to enable inorganic 

 matter to assume the form of organised bodies. Ihen, as every 

 one who is familiar with fossils knows, they present innumerable 

 gradations, from shells and bones which exactly resemble the 

 recent objects, to masses of mere stone which, however accurately 

 they repeat the outward form of the organic body, have nothing 

 else in common with it ; and, thence, to mere traces and faint 

 impressions in the continuous substance of the rock. What we 

 now know to be the results of the chemical changes which take 

 place in the course of fossilization, by which mineral is substituted 

 for organic substance, might, in the absence of such knowledge, 

 be fairly interpreted as the expression of a process of develop- 

 ment in the opposite direction — from the mineral to the organic. 

 Moreover, in an age when it would have seemed the most absurd 

 of paradoxes to suggest that the general level of the sea is 

 constant, while that of the solid land fluctuates up and down 

 through thousands of feet in a secular ground swell, it may well 

 have appeared far less hazardous to conceive that fossils are sports 

 of nature than to accept the necessary alternative, that all the 

 inland regions and highlands, in the rocks of which marine shells 

 had been found, had once been covered by the ocean. It is not so 

 surprising, therefore, as it may at first seem, that although such men 

 as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy took just views of the 

 nature of fossils, the opinion of the majority of their contempo- 

 raries set strongly the other way ; nor even that error maintained 

 itself long after the scientific grounds of the true interpretation of 

 fossils had been stated, in a manner that left nothing to be desired, 

 in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The person who 

 rendered this good service to paleontology was Nicholas Steno, 



