NTS.

Palaeontology, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its
subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It
bears nearly the same sort of relation to the _physical_ history of the
past, that biography does to the civil and political history of the
past. For just as a complete biographic system would include every name
known to the historian, a complete palaeontologic system would include
every fossil known to the geologist. It enumerates and describes all the
organic existences of all the extinct creations,--all the existences,
too, of the present creation that occur in the fossil or semi-fossil
form; and, thus coextensive in space with the earth's surface,--nay,
greatly more than coextensive with the earth's surface,--for in the vast
hieroglyphic record which our globe composes, page lies beneath page,
and inscription covers over inscription,--coextensive, too, in time,
with every period in the terrestrial history since being first began
upon our planet,--it presents to the student a theme so vast and
multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on his part, of a
proper modesty, conscious of the limited range of his powers, and of
the brief and fleeting term of his life, were he to despair of being
ever able effectually to grapple with it. "But," to borrow from one of
the most ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in other
instances in which nature has given us difficulties with which to cope,
she has not left us to be wholly overcome." "If," says Dr. Thomas Brown,
in his remarks on the classifying principle,--"if she has placed us in a
labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us with a clue which may
guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark and intricate windings, but
through those broad paths which conduct us into day. The single power by
which we discover resemblance or relation in general, is a sufficient
aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts at
arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and more than thousands,
into one; and, reducing in the same manner the numbers thus formed, it
arrives at last at the few distinctive characters of those great
comprehensive tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is
nothing left to oppress the memory or the understanding."

But, is this all? Can the Palaeontologist but say that that classifying
principle, which in every other department of science yields such
assistance