4 Berry — Present Tendencies in Paleontology. 



has been frequently pointed out, and if civilization had 

 flowered first in the "Western instead of the Eastern 

 hemisphere, we should have to-day a much more logical 

 geological column. But it was otherwise ordained, and 

 if, adopting the insular motto that North America is good 

 enough for us, we make our scientific horizon coincide 

 with our political horizon, we lose that breadth of view 

 and perspective that is such a necessary part of our 

 philosophy. We exchange for the vocational state of 

 mind of a State University that intangible leaven indi- 

 cated by the much abused word culture, which depends 

 on point of view or perspective. The average European 

 paleontologist has almost invariably a more cosmopolitan 

 viewpoint than the average American paleontologist — 

 an outcome of his training and the fact that the world is 

 his field. It seems to me that proposals such as the 

 elimination of the Permian as a system, or the lumping 

 of the Triassic and Jurassic into a single system, are 

 examples of our provincial point of view, entirely ignor- 

 ing, as they do, the great development of marine series 

 of these ages in other parts of the world. 



The inertia of old ideas and the vitality of traditions, 

 even in radical minds, is astonishing. Witness the slow 

 death of the notion, inherited from Brongniart, that the 

 formation of secondary wood in stems, such as Sigillaria, 

 stamped their possessors as exogenous seed-plants. 

 Witness the implications, still alive and vigorous, that 

 march in the train of the notion that an Age of Reptiles 

 is a chronologic and geologic unit. Perhaps the most 

 striking instance of what I am seeking to illustrate is 

 furnished by the survival of Cuvier's conceptions in 

 stratigraphic paleontology. I doubt if there lives a 

 paleontologist who would defend the theorem that faunas 

 or floras were repeatedly exterminated by cataclysmic 

 revolutions and renewed by special creations, and yet 

 when you see the average paleontologist in action, his 

 logic is inevitably colored by the assumption that a floral 

 or faunal unit had an objective reality and is not merely 

 a cross section of the tree of life at a particular time. 

 Nothing it seems to me is more pernicious than the idea 

 that, perhaps poorly determined, formational bound- 

 aries are circuit breakers in the continuous life stream 

 that has flowed down to us from the immeasurable past. 

 This is especially illustrated in the discussions of the 



