For palaeontologists still follow the irrational
course of inventing a new name, specific or even generic, for a form
that happens to be found in a kind of rock widely separated as to "age"
from the other beds where similar forms are accustomed to be found. As
Angelo Heilprin expresses it, "It is practically certain that numerous
forms of life, exhibiting no distinctive characters of their own, are
constituted into distinct species _for no other reason than that they
occur in formations widely separated from those holding their nearest
kin_."[17]
As a result of these methods this same author declares: "It is by no
means improbable that many of the older _genera_, now recognized as
distinct by reason of our imperfect knowledge concerning their true
relationships, have in reality representatives living in the modern
seas."[18]
[Footnote 17: "Geographical and Geological Distribution of Animals," pp.
183, 184.]
[Footnote 18: _Id_., pp. 207, 208.]
But the situation is very little better when we come to deal with plants
and animals of our modern world. Because, with the many thousands of
students of natural science all over the world, each anxious to get into
print as the discoverer of some new form, the systematists have a dead
weight of names on their hands that by a rational and enlightened
revision could doubtless be reduced to but a fraction of their present
disheartening array.
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