The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

Thomas Henry Huxley

Project Gutenberg's Etext The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

#5 in our series by Thomas Henry Huxley

This is Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition"

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Title: The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

Title: This is Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition"

Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

May, 2001 [Etext #2628]

Project Gutenberg's Etext The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

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Project Gutenberg's Etext The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

by Thomas Henry Huxley

of the first person who, finding something like a shell, or a

bone, naturally imbedded in gravel or rock, indulged in

--this "fossil"--and upon the causes which had brought it into

such a position. In this rudimentary form, a high antiquity may

safely be ascribed to palaeontology, inasmuch as we know that,

500 years before the Christian era, the philosophic doctrines of

Xenophanes were influenced by his observations upon the fossil

remains exposed in the quarries of Syracuse. From this time

forth not only the philosophers, but the poets, the historians,

the geographers of antiquity occasionally refer to fossils;

and, after the revival of learning, lively controversies arose

the first adequate investigation of the fossil remains of any

large group of vertebrated animals is to be found in Cuvier's

founder, William Smith, lived to receive the just recognition of

his services by the award of the first Wollaston Medal in 1831.

But, although palaeontology is a comparatively youthful

scientific speciality, the mass of materials with which it has

to deal is already prodigious. In the last fifty years the

number of known fossil remains of invertebrated animals has been

trebled or quadrupled. The work of interpretation of vertebrate

fossils, the foundations of which were so solidly laid by

Cuvier, was carried on, with wonderful vigour and success, by

Agassiz in Switzerland, by Von Meyer in Germany, and last, but

not least, by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a

multitude of workers have laboured in the same field. In many

groups of the animal kingdom the number of fossil forms already

it is much greater; and there are entire orders of animals of

safely assumed that, at the present moment, we are not

acquainted with a tittle of the fossils which will sooner or

later be discovered. If we may judge by the profusion yielded

within the last few years by the Tertiary formations of North

America, there seems to be no limit to the multitude of

mammalian remains to be expected from that continent;

and analogy leads us to expect similar riches in Eastern Asia,

whenever the Tertiary formations of that region are as carefully

respecting the terrestrial population of the Mesozoic epoch;

were about to prove as instructive in regard to this point as

they have in respect of tertiary life. My friend Professor Marsh

The task which I have set myself to-night is to endeavour to lay

steps by which our present knowledge of the facts of

palaeontology and of those conclusions from them which are

indisputable, has been attained; and I beg leave to remind you,

at the outset, that in attempting to sketch the progress of a

branch of knowledge to which innumerable labours have

contributed, my business is rather with generalisations than

with details. It is my object to mark the epochs of

palaeontology, not to recount all the events of its history.

the remains of animals and plants? Or are they, as was so

generally maintained in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and

bones, just as those portions of mineral matter which we call

crystals take on the form of regular geometrical solids?

Or, again, are they, as others thought, the products of the

germs of animals and of the seeds of plants which have lost

their way, as it were, in the bowels of the earth, and have

achieved only an imperfect and abortive development? It is easy

to sneer at our ancestors for being disposed to reject the first

in favour of one or other of the last two hypotheses; but it is

much more profitable to try to discover why they, who were

really not one whit less sensible persons than our excellent

selves, should have been led to entertain views which strike us

as absurd, The belief in what is erroneously called spontaneous

generation, that is to say, in the development of living matter

out of mineral matter, apart from the agency of pre-existing

which is still held by some of us, was universally accepted as

evidence of the existence in nature of a "plastic force"

competent to enable inorganic matter to assume the form of

organised bodies. Then, as every one who is familiar with

fossils knows, they present innumerable gradations, from shells

and bones which exactly resemble the recent objects, to masses

of mere stone which, however accurately they repeat the outward

form of the organic body, have nothing else in common with it;

and, thence, to mere traces and faint impressions in the

results of the chemical changes which take place in the course

substance, might, in the absence of such knowledge, be fairly

interpreted as the expression of a process of development in the

than to accept the necessary alternative, that all the inland

regions and highlands, in the rocks of which marine shells had

surprising, therefore, as it may at first seem, that although

such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy took just

views of the nature of fossils, the opinion of the majority of

their contemporaries set strongly the other way; nor even that

error maintained itself long after the scientific grounds of the

true interpretation of fossils had been stated, in a manner that

left nothing to be desired, in the latter half of the

seventeenth century. The person who rendered this good service

to palaeontology was Nicolas Steno, professor of anatomy in

glossopetrae were merely fossil sharks' teeth, but his arguments

made no impression. Fifty years later, Steno re-opened the

glossopetrae, left no rational doubt as to the origin of the

latter. Thus far, the work of Steno went little further than

that of Colonna, but it fortunately occurred to him to think out

the whole subject of the interpretation of fossils, and the

result of his meditations was the publication, in 1669, of a

little treatise with the very quaint title of "De Solido intra

Solidum naturaliter contento." The general course of Steno's

argument may be stated in a few words. Fossils are solid bodies

which, by some natural process, have come to be contained within

other solid bodies, namely, the rocks in which they are

embedded; and the fundamental problem of palaeontology, stated

generally, is this: "Given a body endowed with a certain shape

and produced in accordance with natural laws, to find in that

body itself the evidence of the place and manner of its

application of the axiom that "like effects imply like causes,"

compelled to adopt the hypothesis of evolution. Happily, the

future of palaeontology is independent of all hypothetical

considerations. Fifty years hence, whoever undertakes to record

the progress of palaeontology will note the present time as the

epoch in which the law of succession of the forms of the higher

animals was determined by the observation of palaeontological

facts. He will point out that, just as Steno and as Cuvier were

enabled from their knowledge of the empirical laws of co-

whole, so the knowledge of the law of succession of forms

such a succession, to the whole series; and thus to divine the

existence of forms of life, of which, perhaps, no trace remains,

figura praedito et juxta leges naturae producto, in ipso corpore

argumenta invenire locum et modum productionis detegentia."

producta sunt."

(3) Sir J. D. Hooker.

End of Project Gutenberg's Etext The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology

This is Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition"