Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/356

342 years ago, not only were we devoid of any accurate knowledge of the mode of development of many groups of animals and plants, but the methods of investigation were rude and imperfect. At the present time there is no important group of organic beings the development of which has not been carefully studied, and the modern methods of hardening and section-making enable the embryologist to determine the nature of the process in each case, with a degree of minuteness and accuracy which is truly astonishing to those whose memories carry them back to the beginnings of modern histology. And the results of these embryological investigations are in complete harmony with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution. The first beginnings of all the higher forms of animal life are similar, and, however diverse their adult conditions, they start from a common foundation. Moreover, the process of development of the animal or the plant from its primary egg or germ is a true process of evolution—a progress from almost formless to more or less highly organized matter, in virtue of the properties inherent in that matter.

To those who are familiar with the process of development all a priori objections to the doctrine of biological evolution appear childish. Any one who has watched the gradual formation of a complicated animal from the protoplasmic mass which constitutes the essential element of a frog's or a hen's egg has had under his eyes sufficient evidence that a similar evolution of the animal world from the like foundation is, at any rate, possible.

Yet another product of investigation has largely contributed to the removal of the objections to the doctrine of evolution current in 1859. It is the proof afforded by successive discoveries that Mr. Darwin did not over-estimate the imperfection of the geological record. No more striking illustration of this is needed than a comparison of our knowledge of the mammalian fauna of the Tertiary epoch in 1859 with its present condition. M. Gaudry's researches on the fossils of Pikermi were published in 1868, those of Messrs. Leidy, Marsh, and Cope on the fossils of the Western Territories of America have appeared almost wholly since 1870; those of M. Filhol, on the phosphorites of Quercy, in 1878. The general effect of these investigations has been to introduce us to a multitude of extinct animals, the existence of which was previously hardly suspected; just as if zoölogists were to become acquainted with a country, hitherto unknown, as rich in novel forms of life as Brazil or South Africa once was to Europeans. Indeed, the fossil fauna of the Western Territories of America bids fair to exceed in interest and importance all other known Tertiary deposits put together; and yet, with the exception of the case of the American tertiaries, these investigations have extended over very limited areas, and at Pikermi were confined to an extremely small space.

Such appear to me to be the chief events in the history of the progress of knowledge, during the last twenty years, which account