Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/450

445, lusus naturæ, as remains of creatures stranded by tidal waves or cataclysms like the traditional flood, or again as the remains of animals formed by a process of spontaneous generation in the depths of the earth that had failed to reach the surface. It was Leonardo da Vinci of the fifteenth century who, anticipating the naturalists of later times, believed these vestiges are what common-sense says they are—simply relics of creatures that lived when the earth was younger. Cuvier was in a true sense the founder of paleontology; though a special creationist, he recognized that beneath their differences there were fundamental likenesses between recent and extinct animals. He assumed that cataclysms had closed the several geologic epochs whereupon new series of animals and plants were created upon the same general working-plans employed in earlier ages; thus he combined the idea of change in geologic time with a belief in supernatural creation. When, however, Lyell led geologists and others to abandon the cataclysmic hypothesis in favor of the doctrine of uniformitarianism, when the series of known fossil forms increased and the intrinsic value of the paleontological evidence became clearer, the doctrine of evolution finally claimed this field also as its own.

The nature of the case is such that the fossil record must remain incomplete, perhaps forever. For not all the animals of former times possessed hard parts capable of resisting the disintegrating forces of organic and inorganic nature, the rocky tombs of those animals that were embedded in the sands and silts have been crushed and rent asunder by the very geological agencies that at first constructed them. More than half of the earth's surface is now under water, while by no means all of the dry land is accessible. Only a few scratches have been made here and there upon the earth's hard crust, so it is little wonder that the testimony of the rocks is halting and imperfect. But what there is, a rapidly growing body of cold, hard facts, is in itself conclusive evidence of the reality of evolution. Researches like those of Von Zittel, Cope, Hyatt, Marsh, Osborn and Scott, demonstrate that, when they appear at all, the great groups or phyla of animals and their subdivisions succeed one another in that chronological order which comparative anatomy and embryology have independently shown is the order of their evolution. Then, too, there are those fossil types that link together groups now so widely separated, like Archeopteryx, which is at once a feathered reptile and a bird with reptilian tail and skull and limbs. And there are the marvelously perfect series of fossils like those which demonstrate the evolution of modern horses and elephants; and, finally, as the special creationist Louis Agassiz himself showed, some fossil series parallel very closely the embryonic record in modern types. No field opens more invitingly than that of the paleontologist. His tasks are to search the rocks everywhere for new fossil types to