BIOLOGICAL CHANGE IN GEOLOGICAL TIME. 



113 



Heredity, variation and environment, each acting in modifi- 

 cation of the other two, and the vast duration of geological time, 

 seem to furnish this general cause, and render less inexplicable 

 the results of modern pala^ontological investigation, and we are 

 therefore not called upon by these results to doubt that the 

 Eeign of Law is as supreme in the Organic as in the Inorganic 

 world. 



Discussion. 



Rev. G. F. Whidborne, F.G.S. — I am not concerned to defend 

 Dr. Warring's views, but I agree with our Secretary's editorial note 

 that his use of the word exterminations has been misunderstood ; 

 and in my remarks on his paper I used it in the sense which our 

 Secretary attached to it. Certainly the old scientific idea of a 

 number of successive creations and obliterations is disproved alike 

 by Genesis and modern geology, which equally show a single 

 progressive changing creation. 



The true view of the existence of exterminations seems only 

 emphasized by Professor Lobley's interesting paper, and the question 

 remains whether in sweeping away the false idea that geologic 

 periods indicated independent creations, we have not too much 

 minimized the fact that they present us, as it were, with a series of 

 cinematograph views, directly related, but each individualized. Is 

 there a meaning not yet fully appreciated in the fact that geology 

 displays to us a series of correlated tableaux and not a continuous 

 diorama 1 



In his paper the Professor emphasizes not only exterminations (or 

 as he better calls them, extinctions), but origins. Thus he points 

 to the assumed origin of vertebrates in Upper Silurian times. It is 

 easy to call Upper Silurian long subsequent to Cambrian, but 

 relatively to the whole catena it is remarkably early for the appear- 

 ance of so high and so specialised a class as vertebrata ; especially 

 as it cannot be said that they did not before exist, but only that 

 they are not known to have before existed. Further, the variety of 



