ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. xH 



Were such a thought justifiable, it could hardly expect to be 

 received with favoiu* by this assembly. But it is not justifiable. 

 Your favourite science has her own great aims independent of all 

 others; and if, notwithstanding her steady devotion to her own 

 progress, she can scatter such rich alms among her sisters, it should 

 be remembered that her charity is of the sort that does not im- 

 poverish, but ''blesseth him that gives and him that takes." 



Eegard the matter as we will, however, the facts remain. Nearly 

 40,000 species of animals and plants have been added to the Sy- 

 stema Natura; by pala^ontological research. This is a living popu- 

 lation equivalent to that of a new continent in mere number ; equi- 

 valent to that of a new hemisphere, if we take into account the 

 small popidation of insects as yet found fossil, and the large pro- 

 portion and pecuhar organization of many of the Vertebrata. 



But, beyond this, it is perhaps not too much to say that, except 

 for the necessity of interpreting palaeontological facts, the laws of 

 distribution woiild have received less careful study ; while few com- 

 parative anatomists (and those not of the first order) would have 

 been induced by mere love of detail, as such, to study the minutiae 

 of ostcologj', were it not that in such minutiae lie the only keys to 

 the most interesting riddles offered by the extinct animal world. 



These assuredly are great and solid gains. Surely it is matter 

 for no small congratulation that in half a century (for palaeontology, 

 though it dawned earlier, came into full day only with Cuvier) a 

 subordinate branch of biology should have doubled the value and 

 interest of the whole group of sciences to which it belongs. 



But this is not all. Allied with geology, palaeontology has estab- 

 lished two laws of inestimable importance : the first, that one and 

 the same area of the earth's surface has been successively occupied 

 by very different kinds of living beings ; the second, that the order 

 of succession established in one locality holds good, approximately, 

 in all. 



The first of these laws is universal and irreversible ; the second is 

 an induction from a vast number of observations, though it may 

 possibly, and even probably, have to admit of exceptions. As a 

 consequence of the second law, it follows that a peculiar relation 

 frequently subsists between series of strata, containing organic re- 

 mains, in different localities. The series resemble one another, not 

 only in virtue of a general resemblance of the organic remains in the 

 two, but also in virtue of a resemblance in the order and character 

 of the serial succession in each. There is a resemblance of arrange- 

 ment ; so that the separate terms of each series, as v>'ell as the whole 

 scries, exhibit a correspondence. 



Succession impHes time ; the lower members of a series of sedi- 

 mentarj- rocks are certainly older than the upper ; and when the 

 notion of age was once introduced as the equivalent of succession, 

 it was no wonder that correspondence in succession came to bo 

 looked upon as correspondence in age, or *' contemporaneit}." And, 

 indeed, so long as relative age only is spoken of, correspondence in 

 successioji is correspondence in age ; it is relative contcmporajieity, 



