The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology | Page 3

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Project Gutenberg's Etext The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology by
Thomas Henry Huxley This is Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew
Tradition"

That application of the sciences of biology and geology, which is
commonly known as palaeontology, took its origin in the mind of the
first person who, finding something like a shell, or a bone, naturally
imbedded in gravel or rock, indulged in speculations upon the nature of
this thing which he had dug out --this "fossil"--and upon the causes
which had brought it into such a position. In this rudimentary form, a
high antiquity may safely be ascribed to palaeontology, inasmuch as we
know that, 500 years before the Christian era, the philosophic doctrines
of Xenophanes were influenced by his observations upon the fossil
remains exposed in the quarries of Syracuse. From this time forth not
only the philosophers, but the poets, the historians, the geographers of

antiquity occasionally refer to fossils; and, after the revival of learning,
lively controversies arose respecting their real nature. But hardly more
than two centuries have elapsed since this fundamental problem was
first exhaustively treated; it was only in the last century that the
archaeological value of fossils--their importance, I mean, as records of
the history of the earth--was fully recognised; the first adequate
investigation of the fossil remains of any large group of vertebrated
animals is to be found in Cuvier's "Recherches sur les Ossemens
Fossiles," completed in 1822; and, so modern is stratigraphical
palaeontology, that its founder, William Smith, lived to receive the just
recognition of his services by the award of the first Wollaston Medal in
1831.
But, although palaeontology is a comparatively youthful scientific
speciality, the mass of materials with which it has to deal is already
prodigious. In the last fifty years the number of known fossil remains
of invertebrated animals has been trebled or quadrupled. The work of
interpretation of vertebrate fossils, the foundations of which were so
solidly laid by Cuvier, was carried on, with wonderful vigour and
success, by Agassiz in Switzerland, by Von Meyer in Germany, and
last, but not least, by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a
multitude of workers have laboured in the same field. In many groups
of the animal kingdom the number of fossil forms already known is as
great as that of the existing species. In some cases it is much greater;
and there are