44 IOWA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 



In these words Suess concludes his treatise: "There is no 

 means of comparison by which we can illustrate directly the 

 great length of cosmic periods, and we do not even possess a 

 unit with which such periods might be measured. We hold the 

 organic remains of the past in our hand and consider their phys- 

 ical structure, but we know not what interval of time separates, 

 their epoch from our own; they are like those celestial bodies 

 without parallax, which inform us of their physical constitu- 

 tion by their spectrum, but furnish no clue to their distance. 

 As Rama looks out upon the Ocean, its limits mingling and unit- 

 ing with heaven on the horizon, and as he ponders whether a 

 path might not be built into the Immensity, so we look over the 

 Ocean of time, but nowhere do we see signs of a shore." 



Remains one more word only and we have done. For those to 

 whom the prospect seems cold and dreary that modern mate- 

 rialistic science discloses to our view, and for those who are not 

 content with the mere objective values of science, there may be 

 brought before the mind this inspiring message of Darwin. 

 Readers who are not over-familiar with his works may be sur- 

 prised to be told that this passage forms the conclusion of the 

 Origin of Species: 



"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed 

 with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the 

 bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawl- 

 ing through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately 

 constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent 

 on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced 

 by laws acting around us. . . . [The more important of these 

 laws are then enumerated.] Thus, from the war of nature, from 

 famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of 

 conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly 

 follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several 

 powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into 

 one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according 

 to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless 

 forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are 

 being, evolved." 



[Note — The reader who desires information on the more particular relations of 

 palreichthyology to biology— since we have preferred to dwell in the above on the 

 larger aspects of paleontology— will do well to consult two addresses by Smith 

 Woodward: the first printed in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association for 

 1906, entitled "The Studv of Fossil Fishes;" and the second in the Reports of the 

 International Congress of Arts and Sciences at St. Louis, vol. IV, 1906, under the 

 title of "The Relations of Pala-ontology to Biology."] 



