The grander results of the study of paleontology during the evolutionary period may be summed up with the conclusions of Marsh:
“One of the main characteristics of this epoch is the belief that all life, living and extinct, has been evolved from simple forms. Another prominent feature is the accepted fact of the great antiquity of the human race. These are quite sufficient to distinguish this period sharply from those that preceded it.”
Charles Darwin’s work at once aroused attention, and brought about in scientific thought a revolution which “has influenced paleontology as extensively as any other department of science.... In the [previous period] species were represented independently by parallel lines; in the present period, they are indicated by dependent, branching lines. The former was the analytic, the latter is the synthetic period.”
Synthetic Period.—What is to be the next trend in paleontology? Clearly it is to be the Synthetic period, one that Marsh in 1879 indicated in these words: “But if we are permitted to continue in imagination the rapidly converging lines of research pursued to-day, they seem to meet at the point where organic and inorganic nature become one. That this point will yet be reached, I cannot doubt.”
This Synthetic period, foreshadowed also in Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, has not yet arrived, but before long another great leader will appear. We have the prophecy of his coming in such books as The Fitness of the Environment, by Lawrence J. Henderson, 1913; The Origin and Nature of Life, by Benjamin Moore, 1913; The Organism as a Whole, by Jacques Loeb, 1916; and The Origin and Evolution of Life, by Henry F. Osborn, 1917.
In all nature, inorganic and organic, there is continuity and consistency, beauty and design. We are beginning to see that there are eternal laws, ever interacting and resulting in progressive and regressive evolutions. The realization of these scientific revelations kindles in us a desire for more knowledge, and the grandest revelations are yet before us in the synthesis of the sciences.
Notes.
[3]. For more detail in regard to these tillites and the older ones see Climates of Geologic Time, by Charles Schuchert, being Chapter XXI in Huntington’s Climatic Factor as Illustrated in Arid America, Publication No. 192 of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1914. Also Arthur P. Coleman’s presidential address before the Geological Society of America in 1915, Dry Land in Geology, published in the Society’s Bulletin, 27, 175, 1916.
III
A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY.—STEPS OF PROGRESS IN THE INTERPRETATION OF LAND FORMS
By HERBERT E. GREGORY