BULLETIN OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 



VOL. 27, PP. 515-524 SEPTEMBER 1, 1916 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



METHODS OF COBRELATION BY FOSSIL VERTEBBATES 1 



BY W. D. MATTHEW 



(Read before the Paleontological Society August 3, 1915) 



CONTENTS 



Page 



Introduction 515 



Principles 517 



Summary . 520 



Introduction 



It is a time-honored custom to begin a discussion of a subject by a brief 

 sketch of its history, to outline what we used to believe about it, but have 

 outgrown. My old teacher at Columbia, Professor Egleston, used to 

 begin his lectures on metallurgy by explaining to us at great length the 

 old practice, which even then was quite out of date, in order, as he said, 

 that we should know what not to do. Most of us, I am afraid, rather 

 begrudged the time so spent, as we wanted to get some grasp on present 

 practice and probable future developments. Nevertheless there is more 

 than a little advantage in knowing the history of any theory or practice, 

 the trend of its development, the ideas that used to lie back of its 

 methods; for it is almost always true that these discarded theories control 

 our practice and methods to an extent often unsuspected. We are very 

 apt to fail to apply our beliefs logically and to rest on rule-of-thumb 

 methods, whose origin and sanctions lie in the accepted theories of former 

 generations. The dead hand lies heavy on us and controls our procedure 

 more than we think for. 



Certainly this is true of correlation. If we turn back a century or so 

 to the days of Cuvier, we find the doctrines of catastrophism in full sway. 

 A succession of faunas, each created de novo after its predecessor had 



1 This paper was the second in the symposium, "General consideration of Paleonto- 

 logic criteria used in determining time relations," read at the summer meeting of the 

 Paleontological Society at the University of California, August 3, 1915. 



Manuscript received by the Secretary of the Geological Society April 6, 1916. 



(515) 



