212 DARWIN AND PALEONTOLOGY 



new paleontology of evolution, as distinguished 

 from the old paleontology of special creation, 

 reached vast proportions before Darwin's death. 

 But all this remained a terra incognita to Dar- 

 win. Absorbed in his observations on living 

 things, in his vast anthropological, psychological, 

 zoological, and botanical researches in his revision 

 of the Origin and other works, Darwin never 

 found time or opportunity to grasp the meaning 

 of the Darwinian paleontology. He attempted 

 but failed to understand the work of Alpheus 

 Hyatt, which was directly along the Unes of that 

 of Waagen, but unfortunately rendered unneces- 

 sarily mysterious and difficult to comprehend 

 through the inveterate American love of word- 

 making. If Hyatt's work had been expressed 

 in Darwin's simple language, as it might have 

 been, then Darvdn would certainly have grasped 

 the Waagen principle of mutation, and we should 

 have had the benefit of his marvelous insight into 

 its significance. As it was, like Moses, Darwin 

 led his paleontological followers to the Promised 

 Land, but he did not live to enter it ; he gave the 

 impulse to search for phyla, or close continuous 

 lines of descent of animals and plants, hut he 

 himself never observed a single phylum. 



This simple fact is of vast importance in our 

 estimate of the weight to be attached to Dar- 

 win's opinions. In contrast with Herbert Spen- 

 cer he was essentially a deductive-inductive 

 worker; that is, he pursued a trial hypothesis 



