I think that I cannot employ my last opportunity of addressing you, officially, more properly—­I may say more dutifully—­than in revising these old judgments with such help as further knowledge and reflection, and an extreme desire to get at the truth, may afford me.

1.  With respect to the first proposition, I may remark that whatever may be the case among the physical geologists, catastrophic palaeontologists are practically extinct.  It is now no part of recognized geological doctrine that the species of one formation all died out and were replaced by a brand-new set in the next formation.  On the contrary, it is generally, if not universally, agreed that the succession of life has been, the result of a slow and gradual replacement of species by species; and that all appearances of abruptness of change are due to breaks in the series of deposits, or other changes in physical conditions.  The continuity of living forms has been unbroken from the earliest times to the present day.

2, 3.  The use of the word “homotaxis” instead of “synchronism” has not, so far as I know, found much favour in the eyes of geologists.  I hope, therefore, that it is a love for scientific caution, and not mere personal affection for a bantling of my own, which leads me still to think that the change of phrase is of importance, and that the sooner it is made, the sooner shall we get rid of a number of pitfalls which beset the reasoner upon the facts and theories of geology.

One of the latest pieces of foreign intelligence which has reached us is the information that the Austrian geologists have, at last, succumbed to the weighty evidence which M. Barrande has accumulated, and have admitted the doctrine of colonies.  But the admission of the doctrine of colonies implies the further admission that even identity of organic remains is no proof of the synchronism of the deposits which contain them.

4.  The discussions touching the Eozoon, which commenced in 1864, have abundantly justified the fourth proposition.  In 1862, the oldest record of life was in the Cambrian rocks; but if the Eozoon be, as Principal Dawson and Dr. Carpenter have shown so much reason for believing, the remains of a living being, the discovery of its true nature carried life back to a period which, as Sir William Logan has observed, is as remote from that during which the Cambrian rocks were deposited, as the Cambrian epoch itself is from the tertiaries.  In other words, the ascertained duration of life upon the globe was nearly doubled at a stroke.

5.  The significance of persistent types, and of the small amount of change which has taken place even in those forms which can be shown to have been modified, becomes greater and greater in my eyes, the longer I occupy myself with the biology of the past.

Consider how long a time has elapsed since the Miocene epoch.  Yet, at that time, there is reason to believe that every important group in every order of the Mammalia was represented.  Even the comparatively scanty Eocene fauna yields examples of the orders Cheiroptera, Insectivora, Rodentia, and Perissodactyla; of Artiodactyla under both the Ruminant and the Porcine modifications; of Carnivora, Cetacea, and Marsupialia.