y 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
palaeontological 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 organisation of
many of the Vertebrata.

But, beyond this, it is perhaps not too much to say that, except for the
necessity of interpreting palaeontological 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 palaeontology, 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, palaeontology 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
between series of strata containing organic remains, in different
localities. The series resemble one another not only in virtue of a
general resemblance of the organic remains in the two, but also in virtue
of a resemblance in the order and character of the serial succession in
each. There is a resemblance of arrangement; so that the separate terms
of each series