ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xly 
enables us to judge, are quite as highly organized. Thus it is cer- 
tain that a comparatively highly organized vertebrate type, such as 
that of the Labyrinthodonts, is capable of persisting, with no con- 
siderable change, through the period represented-by the vast deposits 
which constitute the Carboniferous, the Permian, and the Triassic 
formations. 
The very remarkable results which have been brought to light 
by the sounding and dredging operations, which have been carried 
on with such remarkable success by the expeditions sent out by our 
own, the American, and the Swedish Governments, under the 
supervision of able naturalists, have a bearing in the same direction. 
These investigations have demonstrated the existence, at great 
depths in the ocean, of living animals in some cases identical with, 
in others very similar to, those which are found fossilized in the 
white chalk. The Globigerine, Coccoliths, Coccospheres, Discoliths 
in the one are absolutely identical with those in the other; there 
are identical, or closely analogous, species of Sponges, Echinoderms, 
and Brachiopods. Off the coast of Portugal, there now lives a 
species of Beryw, which, doubtless, leaves its bones and scales here 
and there in the Atlantic ooze, as its predecessor left its spoils in 
the mud of the sea of the Cretaceous epoch. 
Many years ago* I ventured to speak of the Atlantic mud as 
‘‘modern chalk,” and I know of no fact inconsistent with the view 
which Professor Wyville Thomson has advocated, that the modern 
chalk is not only the lineal descendant of the ancient chalk, but 
that it remains, so to speak, in the possession of the ancestral 
estate; and that from the Cretaceous period (if not much earlier) 
to the present day, the deep sea has covered a large part of what is 
now the area of the Atlantic. But if Globigerina, and Terebratula 
caput-serpentis and Beryx, not to mention other forms of animals 
and of plants, thus bridge over the interval between the present and 
the Mesozoic periods, is it possible that the majority of other living 
things underwent a “‘sea-change into something new and strange” 
all at once? 
7. Thus far I have endeavoured to expand and to enforce by fresh 
arguments, but not to modify in any important respect, the ideas 
submitted to you on a former occasion. But when I come to the 
propositions touching progressive modification, it appears to me, 
with the help of the new light which has broken from various 
quarters, that there is much ground for softening the somewhat 
Brutus-like severity with which, in 1862, I dealt with a doctrine, 
for the truth of which I should have been glad enough to be able 
to find a good foundation. So far, indeed, as the /nvertebrata and 
the lower Vertebrata are concerned, the facts and the conclu- 
sions which are to be drawn from them, appear to me to remain 
what they were. For anything that, as yet, appears to the con- 
trary, the earliest known Marsupials may have been as highly 
organized as their living congeners; the Permian lizards show no 
* ‘Saturday Review,’ 1858, “Chalk, Ancient and Modern.” 
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