©EOLOGY IN ECONOMICS AND EDUCATION. 487 



that rule the biology of the present, have prevailed 

 unbroken from the dawn of existence through what has 

 been termed " half an eternity of time." But on the 

 other hand, it is equally impossible to over-estimate the 

 benefits which geology owes to biology. 



The original biological demonstrations of the Italians, 

 Steno and Moro, made about the year 1740, that the fossil 

 fishes found in the Tertiary beds of Italy agreed in struc- 

 ture with the living fishes of the Mediterranean, and that 

 their skeletal structures showed that they must have once 

 been living beings which inhabited a vanished sea, formed 

 the first of those immovable logical foundation-stones 

 upon which the great science of historical geology has 

 gradually been erected. Again, no doctrine in historical 

 geology has had so vital an effect, so world-wide an 

 influence, as that cf the identification of the individual 

 geological formations by their organic remains. And 

 even at the present day it is the biological or palaeonto- 

 logical section of historical geology which, at bottom, is 

 the more powerful. I can confidently assert (even from 

 my own experience, and mine is only a type of the 

 experience of others) that whenever the geological section 

 of historical geology — stratigraphy — and its biological 

 section — palaeontology — are in conflict, it is the biological 

 side which is invariably the victor. The whole history of 

 the progress of geology is starred with names of biologists 

 and palaeontologists who have enriched that science by 

 their ideas or their discoveries, from Moro to Cuvier, to 

 Edward Forbes, Agassiz, Huxley, Wallace, and to the 

 great Darwin himself. 



I have said that there is no need to apologise for the 

 existence of the science of geology, or to claim a place 

 for it among those sciences beneficial to humanity, to 

 biological men. I wish, however, I could say as much for 



