TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 679 



"^ My friend Dr. Traquair lias recently tlius expressed, in relation to liis own 

 subject, what I have attempted to make more general: — 'The man who satisfac- 

 torily investigates the structure or determines the systematic position of a fish or 

 reptile preserved in stone is as much a zoologist as he who describes a similar crea^ 

 ture preserved in spirits, though with this diflerence, that the former task is in some 

 points rather the more difficult, seeing that we have only the hard parts to go upon, 

 and these generally in a crushed, fragmentary, or scattered condition. And,' he 

 adds, •' without a genuine interest in, as well as a thorough knowledge of, recent 

 biology no one can hope to produce work of any value in palaeontology.' 



Of course the value of all palajontological work, as of all zoological or botanical 

 work, must depend entirely upon the care and exactness with which the work is 

 performed. 



Time, the great assessor of all human labours, will sit in judgment upon them 

 and pronounce by their durability or instability the comparative value of each. 



It appears to me that to the careful palseontological worker, as to the careful 

 archseologist, the greatest merit is due if he succeed correctly in deciphering the too 

 often fragmentary and blurred remains of a bygone age, and giving us in the present 

 an accurate interpretation of a page from the life-history of the past. 



Then, too, there is the geological aspect of palaeontology. And here I may 

 state that one of the charges made by a brother zoologist against us is ' that we 

 use fossils merely as counters by which to record the progress of geological time.' 



As well might exception be taken that the milestones along a turnpike road 

 had been used by a traveller to calculate the length of his journey. 



But omitting the word merely (for fossils have been made to give up many 

 secrets to the investigator besides their age), I gladly accept the charge as 

 conveying a gi-eat and important truth. 



Do not the historian and the antiquary use the coins and medals dug from the 

 ruins of the dead and long past dynasties of the world as sure guides in the 

 chronology of the human period ? 



And may not the geologist also use ' the medals of creation ' — as Dr. Mantell 

 aptly called them — coined in no counterfeit mint, as the best and most trustworthy 

 guides to enable him to establish the chronology of the stratified rocks of the earth ? 

 Great, then, as is the benefit which zoology has derived from paleontology in 

 enabling the zoologist to learn the earliest appearance in time of each group of 

 organisms, and the modifications in structure, bo far as we are enabled to ascertain 

 them, which each may have undergone from the ancient to the modern period — it 

 may be doubted whether even this valuable aid equals the service performed to 

 .stratigraphical geology by the careful study of organic remains — in enabling us to 

 write the chronology of the rocks over so large a portion of the habitable globe. . 

 Without fossils stratigraphical geology would be as unsatisfaotory as it would 

 certainly be uninteresting ; with their aid it becomes, both in the field and in the 

 cabinet, one of the most attractive and delightful of studies. 



Owing to the very nature of sedimentary deposits, being of necessity either 

 lacustrine, estuarine, or marine in origin, our knowledge of tlie ancient land 

 surfaces of the globe is necessarily very limited, but we know much concerning its 

 old marine areas. These are the more constant and widespread, and it is mainly 

 upon these deposits, and not so much upon the more limited evidences of ancient 

 land sm-faces, that our chronology has been based. 



Of the antiquity of cave-folk and their contemporary mammalia we may expect 

 to hear the very latest utterances from Professor Boyd Dawkins and Dr. 

 Hicks. The former is also to be congratulated upon his renewed work on 

 the Mammalia in the Palajontographical Society's volume for 1886 (just issued). 

 Professor 0. C. Marsh has added a further contribution to American palaeontology 

 in the shape of a memoir describing and figuring sixteen new species of Mesozoic 

 mammals from the Upper Jurassic rocks in Wyoming, on the western slope of the 

 Rocky Mountains. Mr. Lydekker has just completed Part V. of his most useful 

 and much-needed Catalogue of the Fossil Mammalia in the British Museum, con- 

 taining the Sirenia, Cetacea, Edentata, Marsupialia., and Monotremata. 



The fossil birds remain to be catalogued. In the Reptilia it is refreshing to see 



