THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
By Francis Arthur Bather
Keeper of Geology, British Museum (Natural History); President Geological Society
When the celebrated Huxley was near the beginning of his career he was very cautious about accepting evolution, and, among other wise warnings, he said that he saw no evidence for it in fossils. At that time Huxley had not specially studied fossils or geology. Later in life he was appointed palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and he then had studied fossils to such good effect that he was elected President of the Geological Society of London. The more he learned about fossils, the more did he change his early opinion, so that in 1881, when he lectured to the British Association at York, he was impelled to say: “If the theory of Evolution had not already been put forward, palaeontologists would have had to invent it.”
The great Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz had a more profound knowledge of certain groups of fossils than any other scientific man of his day. He saw that their distribution in the rocks showed a definite succession and followed certain laws. There was no meaningless scattering—“a tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing”—but a history as logical as any that has been written about human affairs. In any group, such as the fishes, which he himself studied,
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