Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/184

172 that, throughout the prodigious duration of time registered by the fossiliferous rocks, the living population of the earth had undergone continual changes, not merely by the extinction of a certain number of the species which at first existed, but by the continual generation of new species, and the no less constant extinction of old ones.

Thus, the broad outlines of paleontology, in so far as it is the common property of both the geologist and the biologist, were marked out at the close of the last century. In tracing its subsequent progress I must confine myself to the province of biology, and indeed to the influence of paleontology upon zoölogical morphology. And I accept this limitation the more willingly as the no less important topic of the bearing of geology and of paleontology upon distribution has been luminously treated in the address of the President of the Geographical Section.

The succession of the species of animals and plants in time being established, the first question which the zoölogist or the botanist had to ask himself was, "What is the relation of these successive species one to another?" And it is a curious circumstance that the most important event in the history of paleontology which immediately succeeded William Smith's generalization was a discovery which, could it have been rightly appreciated at the time, would have gone far toward suggesting the answer, which was in fact delayed for more than half a century. I refer to Cuvier's investigation of the mammalian fossils yielded by the quarries in the older Tertiary rocks of Montmartre, among the chief results of which was the bringing to light of two genera of extinct hoofed quadrupeds, the Anoplotherium and the Palæotherium. The rich materials at Cuvier's disposition enabled him to obtain a full knowledge of the osteology and of the dentition of these two forms, and consequently to compare their structure critically with that of existing hoofed animals. The effect of this comparison was to prove that the Anoplotherium, though it presented many points of resemblance with the pigs on the one hand, and with the ruminants on the other, differed from both to such an extent that it could find a place in neither group. In fact, it held, in some respects, an intermediate position, tending to bridge over the interval between these two groups, which in the existing fauna are so distinct. In the same way, the Palæotherium tended to connect forms so different as the tapir, the rhinoceros, and the horse. Subsequent investigations have brought to light a variety of facts of the same order, the most curious and striking of which are those which prove the existence, in the Mesozoic epoch, of a series of forms intermediate between birds and reptiles—two classes of vertebrate animals which at present appear to be more widely separated than any others. Yet the interval between them is completely filled, in the mesozoic fauna, by birds which have reptilian characters on the one side, and reptiles which have ornithic characters on the other. So, again, while the group of