Contrariwise, any admissible hypothesis of progressive modification must be compatible with persistence without progression, through indefinite periods.  And should such an hypothesis eventually be proved to be true, in the only way in which it can be demonstrated, viz. by observation and experiment upon the existing forms of life, the conclusion will inevitably present itself, that the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Cainozoic faunae and florae, taken together, bear somewhat the same proportion to the whole series of living beings which have occupied this globe, as the existing fauna and flora do to them.

Such are the results of palaeontology as they appear, and have for some years appeared, to the mind of an inquirer who regards that study simply as one of the applications of the great biological sciences, and who desires to see it placed upon the same sound basis as other branches of physical inquiry.  If the arguments which have been brought forward are valid, probably no one, in view of the present state of opinion, will be inclined to think the time wasted which has been spent upon their elaboration.

FOOTNOTES: 

[33] “Le plus grand service qu’on puisse rendre a la science est d’y faire place nette avant d’y rien construire.”—­CUVIER.

[34] Anniversary Address for 1851, Quart.  Journ.  Geol.  Soc. vol. vii.

[35] See Hooker’s “Introductory Essay to the Flora of Tasmania,” p. xxiii.

[36] See the abstract of a Lecture “On the Persistent Types of Animal Life” in the “Notices of the Meetings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain,” June 3, 1859, vol. iii. p. 151.

[37] “Memoirs of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom.—­Decade x.  Preliminary Essay upon the Systematic Arrangement of the Fishes of the Devonian Epoch.”

[38] As this Address is passing through the press (March 7, 1862), evidence lies before me of the existence of a new Labyrinthodont (Pholidogaster), from the Edinburgh coal-field, with well-ossified vertebral centra.

XI.

GEOLOGICAL REFORM.

     “A great reform in geological speculation seems now to have become
     necessary.”

     “It is quite certain that a great mistake has been made,—­that
     British popular geology at the present time is in direct opposition
     to the principles of Natural Philosophy."[39]

In reviewing the course of geological thought during the past year, for the purpose of discovering those matters to which I might most fitly direct your attention in the Address which it now becomes my duty to deliver from the Presidential Chair, the two somewhat alarming sentences which I have just read, and which occur in an able and interesting essay by an eminent natural philosopher, rose into such prominence before my mind that they eclipsed everything else.