126 Reviews — American Palceontology. 



The commonness of invertebrate fossils and their value as geological 

 time markers, together with the apparent ease of determining them, 

 caused their study to be pursued by men who had sliglit acquaintance 

 with the structure of their recent allies, and led in the main to the 

 description of great numbers of species and genera on characters 

 chosen entirely at haphazard. This statement is perhaps too sweeping 

 a charge to bring against the followers of a great science tlirough 

 a long period of its history, but the accused could urge with justice 

 that they did what they could and that the method was legitimized 

 by the geological impoi'tance of its results. 



The study of invertebrate fossils, carried on as it was by men who 

 were more interested in the geological aspect of their science than in 

 its bearing on biology, was for j-ears unaffected by the coming of the 

 evolution theory. In 1866 Alpheus Hyatt published the first of that 

 great series of papers which by introducing a new method, founded 

 on the belief that " ontogeny repeats phylogeny ", has revolutionized 

 the whole point of view of invertebrate palaeontologists, who are 

 once again becoming biologists. It is unfortunate that Hyatt's 

 work, containing as it does a philosophical conception of the first 

 importance, the law of acceleration in development, is presented in 

 such a way as to be nearly unintelligible. Following Hyatt, many 

 authors — Hilgendorf, Waagen, Neumeyer, Branco, Mojsisovics, 

 Buckman, Karpinsky, Jackson, and Beecher — have used his method 

 and introduced others until there has been gradually built up a whole 

 system of treatment of palaeontological material, distinct in its 

 philosophical basis from that appropriate to zoology in that it is 

 wholly founded on the time sequence of the objects of its study, and 

 depends for its success on the appreciation of those minute characters 

 which represent the beginnings in evolution of the prominent features 

 of later tj'pes. 



Palaeontology by these methods has reached conceptions of great 

 importance to the science of biology, and will in time achieve its true 

 place as the final arbiter of rival evolution theories, for it alone has 

 access to those monumental records which are the sole contemporary 

 evidence. 



On its geological side the new palgeontology is no less helpful than 

 in its biological aspects ; it has for the first time given a rational 

 basis to the finer divisions of geological time, and has enabled its 

 students to divide up some formations to an almost incredible extent. 



The old palaeontology, with its crude methods or rather lack of all 

 method, and its dry-as-dust accumulation of 'facts', is doomed, and 

 few will regret its passing. 



Vertebrate Palaeontology, owing to the character of its material, 

 has always been pursued by men who were primarily comparative 

 anatomists, and as such has always been a biological science. In 

 consequence, it felt to the full the influence of Darwin's Origin of 

 Species, the more so as that work was iu part originalh^ suggested 

 by the fossil mammals of Patagonia. 



Prom the time of A. Gaudry's classical account of the Miocene 

 fauna of Pikermi, nearly all work on fossil vertebrates has been based 

 on evolutionary ideas, and from the genius of its masters, Kowalevsky 



