said the great engineer, "were made to feed canals"; and geology, some
seem to think, was solely created to advance comparative anatomy.

Were such a thought justifiable, it could hardly expect to be received
with favour by this assembly. But it is not justifiable. Your favourite
science has her own great aims independent of all others; and if,
notwithstanding her steady devotion to her own progress, she can scatter
such rich alms among her sisters, it should be remembered that her
charity is of the sort that does not impoverish, but "blesseth him that
gives and him that takes."

Regard the matter as we will, however, the facts remain. Nearly 40,000
species of animals and plants have been added to the Systema Naturae by
paleontologic research. This is a living population equivalent to
that of a new continent in mere number; equivalent to that of a new
hemisphere, if we take into account the small population of insects as
yet found fossil, and the large proportion and peculiar organization of
many of the Vertebrata.

But, beyond this, it is perhaps not too much to say that, except for the
necessity of interpreting paleontologic facts, the laws of distribution
would have received less careful study; while few comparative anatomists
(and those not of the first order) would have been induced by mere love
of detail, as such, to study the minutiae of osteology, were it not
that in such minutiae lie the only keys to the most interesting riddles
offered by the extinct animal world.

These assuredly are great and solid gains. Surely it is matter for no
small congratulation that in half a century (for paleontology, though
it dawned earlier, came into full day only with Cuvier) a subordinate
branch of biology should have doubled the value and the interest of the
whole group of sciences to which it belongs.

But this is not all. Allied with geology, paleontology has established
two laws of inestimable importance: the first, that one and the same
area of the earth's surface has been successively occupied by very
different kinds of living beings; the second, that the order of
succession established in one locality holds good, approximately, in
all.

The first of these laws is universal and irreversible; the second is an
induction from a vast number of observations, though it may possibly,
and even probably, have to admit of exceptions. As a consequence of
the second law, it follows that a peculiar relation frequently subsists