The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology
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palaeontology, the question which has to be settled before any
other can be profitably discussed, is this, What is the nature
of fossils? Are they, as the healthy common sense of the ancient
Greeks appears to have led them to assume without hesitation,
the remains of animals and plants? Or are they, as was so
generally maintained in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, mere figured stones, portions of mineral
matter which have assumed the forms of leaves and shells and
bones, just as those portions of mineral matter which we call
crystals take on the form of regular geometrical solids?
Or, again, are they, as others thought, the products of the
germs of animals and of the seeds of plants which have lost
their way, as it were, in the bowels of the earth, and have
achieved only an imperfect and abortive development? It is easy
to sneer at our ancestors for being disposed to reject the first
in favour of one or other of the last two hypotheses; but it is
much more profitable to try to discover why they, who were
really not one whit less sensible persons than our excellent
selves, should have been led to entertain views which strike us
as absurd, The belief in what is erroneously called spontaneous
generation, that is to say, in the development of living matter
out of mineral matter, apart from the agency of pre-existing
living matter, as an ordinary occurrence at the present day--
which is still held by some of us, was universally accepted as
an obvious truth by them. They could point to the arborescent
forms assumed by hoar-frost and by sundry metallic minerals as
evidence of the existence in nature of a "plastic force"
competent to enable inorganic matter to assume the form of
organised bodies. Then, as every one who is familiar with
fossils knows, they present innumerable gradations, from shells
and bones which exactly resemble the recent objects, to masses
of mere stone which, however accurately they repeat the outward
form of the organic body, have nothing else in common with it;
and, thence, to mere traces and faint impressions in the
continuous substance of the rock. What we now know to be the