| → do not include many 1869 1872 |
| include few 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
|
| → OMIT 1872 |
| by catastrophes; and 1859 1860 1861 1866 1869 |
|
|
of already recorded species. Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation. The rules for classifying will no doubt become simpler when we have a definite object in view. We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to discover and trace the many diverging lines of descent in our natural genealogies, by characters of any kind which have long been inherited. Rudimentary organs will speak infallibly with respect to the nature of long-lost structures. Species and groups of
which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be called living fossils, will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life. Embryology will
to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototypes of each great class. |
|
| When we can feel assured that all the individuals of the same species, and all the closely allied species of most genera, have within a not very remote period
from one parent, and have migrated from some one
and when we better know the many means of migration, then, by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on former changes of climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely be enabled to trace in an admirable manner the former migrations of the inhabitants of the whole world. Even at present, by comparing the differences
the inhabitants of the sea on the opposite sides of a continent, and the nature of the various inhabitants
that continent in relation to their apparent means of immigration, some light can be thrown on ancient geography. |
|
| The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its
remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual concurrence of
and the blank intervals between the successive stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic forms. We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as strictly contemporaneous two formations, which
→do not include many
identical species, by the general succession of
forms of life. As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of
and
→OMIT
as the most important of all causes of organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical
|
