THE STATE GEOLOGIST. 31 



difference between zoology and palaeontology, it being evident, 

 as Huxley has said, that "fossils are only animals and plants 

 which have been dead rather longer than those that died yester- 

 day." In the same way, palaeichthyology, or that branch of nat- 

 ural science which treats of fossil fishes, extends our information 

 from the existing fauna back to the earliest advent of vertebrate 

 life upon our globe, and furnishes important information concern- 

 ing the mode of succession and evolution of one of the great 

 classes of back-boned creatures, the ground-type of that remark- 

 able sequence of forms whose culmination is man. 



Right at the outset we are brought face to face with the all- 

 important and all-pervading doctrine of evolution, which forces 

 upon us the truth that man is an organism amongst organisms, 

 his origin and history being in nowise disassociated from the 

 origin and history of other living creatures in the world. Let 

 us once appreciate the intense human interest in the study of 

 organic creation, once recognize the fact that geology reveals 

 an elaborate history of organisms that have successively popu- 

 lated the earth from the time life first began, and it is clear that 

 we enter upon a most fascinating field for research. Stripping 

 palaeontology of its more technical aspects, and looking upon it 

 in a broad way as part of universal history, the foremost question 

 we should seek to answer is, what general principles or laws are 

 revealed by this history? Having ascertained what these laws 

 are, we have next to interpret them philosophically, to ascertain 

 the underlying cause or causes to which they are attributable. 

 Do they of themselves afford a satisfactory summing up of the 

 operation of natural processes which have always been at work 

 in the world, and have the latter merely happened to behave in 

 this manner — fortuitously, rather than in some other manner — • 

 or do they suggest a teleological explanation, in that they reflect 

 the presence of ulterior plan and design? 



In respect to* these fundamental problems, palaeontology vastly 

 enlarges the material at our disposal for philosophical analysis, 

 furnishing at the same time a most important aid and ally to 

 cognate sciences like zoology and embryology ; and the extent to 

 which these sciences severally supplement one another is indeed 

 remarkable. A word may be said to illustrate the truth of this 



