Wincliell.l ^*^^ [May 6, 



It seems to me that the doctrine asserting tlie influence of geograi:)hical 

 and other physical conditions, is being carried entirely too far. That the or- 

 ganic beings which populated the earth in past ages must have been distrib- 

 uted in each jieriod, in faunas geographically restricted, under laws identical 

 with those which now determine the distribution of animals and plants, is 

 a doctrine which every reflecting paleontologist has either asserted or im- 

 plied. '*5 It would be puerile, indeed, to attempt to draw a stratigraphical 

 induction from paleontological data, without keeping in view the known 

 laws of faunal circumscription. But it is a new and an unprecedented 

 procedure for a geologist to attribute to physical conditions the char- 

 acteristics which the common consent of all paleontologists has assigned 

 to faunas which lived in difl^erent ages of the world. This is to recede to 

 'the platform of De Maillet and Lamarck ; it is to yield the determination 

 of the organic fades of a geological period to the chances of physical con- 

 ditions, instead of the domination of an intelligent method of sequence 

 and adaptation; it is to surrender the grand procession of organic forms 

 through past time, to the moulding and determinative influence of the 

 secular changes of the physical world ; it is to turn our backs upon posi- 

 tions which have been so ably and so successfully defended by our great 

 adopted naturalist; it is to drown the key-note of the celebrated " Essay 

 on Classification" in the discord of transmutationism and materialism. 



The following extract is from the celebrated paper of de A^erneuil, to 

 which allusion has so often been made :'''s "We have endeavored to prove 

 that the first traces of organic life in countries the most remote, appear 

 under forms nearly alike, at the base of the Silurian System; and that the 

 same types, often the same species, are successively, and in parallel order, 

 developed through the entire series of the paleozoic beds. If we have 

 not succeeded in lifting the vail which still hides from us the cause of this 

 grand phenomenon, perhaps, at least, our observations have demonstrated 

 the insufliciency of those causes by which certain authors seek to explain it. 

 They prove, in effect, that i7ie plienoonenon itself is independent of the in- 

 fl'usnces wMcli the depths of seas exercise upon the distribution of animals; 

 for if, in certain countries, the Silurian deposits prove a deep sea, they 

 have, on the contrary, in the State of New York, a littoral character. 

 They prove, in fine, that, in its general character, it is equally indepen- 

 dent of the upheavings which have affected the surface of the globe ; for, 

 from the eastern frontier of Russia even to Missouri — distant from, or 

 near the lines of dislocation — in the horizontal beds as well as those which 

 are disturbed, the law according to which it is accomplished appears to be 

 uniform." " We do not pretend to say that the differences of depth in 

 the seas had not already an influence upon the distribution of animals; it 

 is to this circumstance, on the contrary, that we attribute the more or less 

 local faunae which we often discover in the paleozoic formation. But 

 these local faunae always afford some species lohich connect them icith the 



"5 gee, witti multitudes of others, the "works of Lyell, Sharpe, Salter, de VerJieuil, d'Orbigny, 

 Pictet, and especially of Barrande and Agassiz. 

 "»See Amer. Jour. Sci. [2], vii. 51, 



