sophy has been brought against us, rather shows that we
have exercised a wise discrimination in declining, for the present, to
meddle with our foundations.

XI

PALAEONTOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION

[1870]

It is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard
Horner, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the
Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address. I
availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to "take stock" of that
portion of the science of biology which is commonly called
"palaeontology," as it then existed; and, discussing one after another the
doctrines held by palaeontologists, I put before you the results of my
attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or the
doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those results
were:--

1. The living population of all parts of the earth's surface which have
yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes which, upon the
whole, have been of a slow and gradual character.

2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these successive
changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less distant parts of
the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit a certain broad and
general parallelism. In other words, certain forms of life in one
locality occur in the same general order of succession as, or are
_homotaxial_ with, similar forms in the other locality.

3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism without
independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even identical,
faunae and florae in two different localities may be of extremely different
ages, if the term "age" is used in its proper chronological sense. I
stated that "geographical provinces, or zones, may have been as
distinctly marked in the Palaeozoic epoch as at present; and those
seemingly sudden appearances of new genera and species which we ascribe
to new creation, may be simple results of migration."

4. The opinion that the oldest known fossils are the earliest forms of
life has no solid foundation.

5. If we confine ourselves to positively ascertained facts, the total
amount of change in the forms of animal and vegetable life, since the
existence of such forms is recorded, is small. When compared with the
lapse of time since the first appearance of these forms, the amount of
change is wonderfully small. Moreover, in each great group of the animal
and v