I fancy I hear some one object, and ask what we are to do with the
systematic arrangement of the fossils, the so-called "geological
succession," that monument to the painstaking labors of thousands of
scientists all over the world. This geological series is still on our
hands; what are we to do with it?
It is scarcely necessary for me to say that this arrangement of the
fossils is not at all affected by my criticism of the cause of the
geological changes. _The geological series is merely an old-time
taxonomic series, a classification of the forms of life that used_ _to
live on the earth_, and is of course just as artificial as any similar
arrangement of the modern forms of life would be.
We may illustrate the matter by comparing this series with a card index.
The earlier students of geology arranged the outline of the order of the
fossils by a rather general comparison with the series of modern life
forms, which happened to agree fairly well with the order in which they
had found the fossils occurring in England and France. But only a block
out of the middle of the complete card index could be made up from the
rocks of England and France; the rest has had to be made up from the
rocks found elsewhere. Louis Agassiz did herculean work in rearranging
and trimming this fossil card index so as to make it conform better, not
only to the companion card index of the modern forms of life, but also
to that of the embryonic series.
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