Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/185

Rh fishes termed ganoids is at the present time so distinct from that of the dipnoi or mud-fishes that they have been reckoned as distinct orders, the Devonian strata present us with forms of which it is impossible to say with certainty whether they are dipnoi or whether they are ganoids.

Agassiz's long and elaborate researches upon fossil fishes, published between 1833 and 1842, led him to suggest the existence of another kind of relation between ancient and modern forms of life. He observed that the oldest fishes presented many characters which recall the embryonic conditions of existing fishes; and that, not only among fishes, but in several groups of the invertebrata which have a long paleontological history, the latest forms are more modified, more specialized, than the earlier. The fact that the dentition of the older tertiary ungulate and carnivorous mammals is always complete, noticed by Professor Owen, illustrated the same generalization.

Another no less suggestive observation was made by Mr. Darwin, whose personal investigations during the voyage of the Beagle led him to remark upon the singular fact that the fauna which immediately precedes that at present existing in any geographical province of distribution presents the same peculiarities as its successor. Thus, in South America and in Australia, the later tertiary or quaternary fossils show that the fauna which immediately preceded that of the present day was, in the one case, as much characterized by edentates and in the other by marsupials as it is now, although the species of the older are largely different from those of the newer fauna.

However clearly these indications might point in one direction, the question of the exact relation of the successive forms of animal and vegetable life could be satisfactorily settled only in one way—namely, by comparing, stage by stage, the series of forms presented by one and the same type throughout a long space of time. Within the last few years this has been done fully in the case of the horse, less completely in the case of the other principal types of the ungulata and of the carnivora, and all these investigations tend to one general result—namely, that in any given series the successive members of that series present a gradually increasing specialization of structure. That is to say, if any such mammal at present existing has specially modified and reduced limbs or dentition and complicated brain, its predecessors in time show less and less modification and reduction in limbs and teeth and a less highly developed brain. The labors of Gaudry, Marsh, and Cope furnish abundant illustrations of this law from the marvelous fossil wealth of Pikermi, and the vast uninterrupted series of tertiary rocks in the Territories of North America.

I will now sum up the results of this sketch of the rise and progress of paleontology. The whole fabric of paleontology is based upon two propositions: the first is, that fossils are the remains of animals and plants; and the second is, that the stratified rocks in which