Professor Steinraann has recently done so in Frei- 

 burg in Breisgau, on the occasion of an address as Rector 

 of the University. What conclusions did he reach? 



Steinmann declares it to be the primary task of post- 

 Darwinian palaeontology "to arrange the fossil animal and 

 plant-remains in the order of descent and thus to build up 

 a truly natural, because historically demonstrable, classifi- 

 cation of the animal and plant-world." At the outset it is 

 to be noted that for various reasons palaeontology is unable 

 to execute this momentous task in its full extent. The evi- 

 dence of palaeontology is deficient, if for no other reason 

 than that many animal organisms could not be preserved 

 at all on account of their soft bodies; many animal groups 

 have, nevertheless, received an unusual increase (mollusks, 

 radiata, fish, saurians, vertebrates, and dendroid plants). 



As regards the attempt made in the sixties to draw up 

 lines of descent, Steinmann repudiates, without, of course, 

 mentioning names, the family tree constructed by Haeckel 

 and his associates as wholly hypothetical and hence unjust- 

 ified; he rightly remarks that their method smacks of the 

 closet. He finds fault with them chiefly because they pre- 

 dicated actuality of this imaginary family-tree and fancied 

 that the historical research of the future would have but 

 isolated facts to establish. 



In speaking of the palaeontological research of the last 

 few decades, Steinmann says: "In the light of recent re- 

 search, fossil discoveries have frequently appeared less in- 

 telligible and more ambiguous- than before, and in those 



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