Henry Fairfield Osborn

“ The birth of new characters is the crucial point in the origin of fitness. With Darwin himself, with Cope, with Bateson, we do not regard the Darwinian law of selection as the creative or birth factor; by its very terms it operates after there is something of value to select. Forgetting this distinction, some naturalists are so blind as to fail to see that selection is still the supreme factor in evolution in the sense that it produces the most grand and sweeping results as well as the most inconspicuous results in the organic world. ”

“ If so, you should know that not a five foot shelf of books, not even the ardent reading of a fifty foot shelf aided by prodigious memory will give you that enviable thing called culture, because the yardstick of this precious quality is not what you take in but what you give out, and this from the subtle chemistry of your brain must have passed through a mental metabolism of your own so that you have lent something to it. ”

“ The mutual relations of palaeontology and embryology and comparative anatomy as means of determining the ancestry of animals are most interesting. In tracing the phylogeny, or ancestral history of organs, palaeontology affords the only absolute criterion on the successive evolution of organs in time as well as of (progressive) evolution in form. From comparative anatomy alone it is possible to arrange a series of living forms which, although structurally a convincing array because placed in a graded series, may be, nevertheless, in an order inverse to that of the actual historical succession. ”

“ Considering that the origin and development of any creature are best furthered by a struggle for existence sufficiently severe to demand the full and frequent exercise of its powers of mind and body, it is interesting to trace the sequence of natural events which prepared western Europe for the entrance of the earliest branches of the human race. The forests and plants portray even more vividly than the animals the changing conditions of the environment and temperature which marked the approach and various vicissitudes of the great Ice Age. ”

“ We were in the very midst of the more thorough examination of this Patagonian and Pampæan world when the scene of new discovery suddenly changed to North Africa—previously the 'dark continent' of paleontology—and again a complete series of surprises was forthcoming. Each continent has solved its quota of problems and has aroused its quota of new ones. Now we look to central and South Africa, to the practically unknown eastern Asia, and possibly to a portion of the half sunken continent of Antarctica for a future stock of answers and new queries. ”

“ The most sanguine day of the college year is the opening one: the student has not yet faced the impossible task annually presented of embracing the modern world of knowledge; his errors and failures of earlier years are forgotten; he faces the coming months full of new hope.
How would my old master, Huxley, address you if he were to find you in this felicitous frame of mind, sharpening your wits and your pencils for the contest which will begin to-morrow morning in every hall and [Pg 6] laboratory of this great University? ”

“ There can be little doubt that such diversities of temperament, of talent, and of predisposition as obtain to-day also prevailed then, and that they tended to differentiate society into chieftains, priests, and medicine-men, hunters of large game and fishermen, fashioners of flints and dressers of hides, makers of clothing and footwear, makers of ornaments, engravers, sculptors in wood, bone, ivory, and stone, and artists with color and brush. In their artistic work, at least, these people were animated with a compelling sense of truth, and we cannot deny them a strong appreciation of beauty. ”

“ In discovery the chief theater of interest shifts from continent to continent in an unexpected and almost sensational manner. In 1870, all eyes were centered on North America and especially on Rocky Mountain exploration; for many ensuing years, new and even unthought of orders of beings came to the surface of knowledge, revolutionizing our thought, firmly establishing the evolution theory and appearing to solve some of the most important problems of descent. Then the stage shifted to South America, where an equally surprising revelation of unthought of life was made. ”

“ It should be remembered that palaeontology is the most unfavourable field of all for observation and demonstration of sudden salutations or mutations of character, because of the limited materials available for comparison and the rarity of genetic series. It should be borne in mind, first, that wherever a new animal suddenly appears or a new character suddenly arises in a fossil horizon we must consider whether such appearance maybe due to the non-discovery of transitional links with older forms, or to the sudden invasion of a new type or new organ which has gradually evolved elsewhere. ”

“ The sources of our facts are and always have been the same, namely, the learning of what men before you have observed and recorded, and the advance only through the observation of new truth, that is, old to nature but new to man. The handling of this knowledge has always been the same, namely, through human reason. The giving forth of this knowledge and thus the furthering of ideas and customs has and always will be the same, namely, through expression, vocal, written, or manual, that is, in symbols and in design. ”

“ Throughout this long epoch western Europe is to be viewed as a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the sea and stretching westward from the great land mass of eastern Europe and of Asia, which was the chief theatre of evolution both of animal and human life. ”

“ Geology and Palaeophysiography.—Fossils are not absolute timekeepers, because we have little idea of the rate of evolution; they are only relative timekeepers, which enable us to check off the period of deposition of one formation with that of another. Huxley questioned the time value of fossils, but recent research has tended to show that identity of species and of mutations is, on the whole, a guide to synchroneity, though the general range of vertebrate and invertebrate life as well as of plant life is generally necessary for the establishment of approximate synchronise. ”

“ The entrance to the final cultures of the Upper Palæolithic, known as the Azilian-Tardenoisian, marks a transition even more abrupt than that witnessed in any preceding stage. It is not a development; it is a revolution. The artistic spirit entirely disappears; there is no trace of animal engraving or sculpture; painting is found only on flattened pebbles or in schematic or geometric designs on wall surfaces. ”

“ Here again paleontology is not merely an auxiliary to zoology; it is chief of a division and enjoys certain unique advantages. We pass in review with the pedigrees and the prodigies of fitness, the entirely unreasonable, irrational, paradoxical extremes of structure, such, for example, as the pterosaurs, which far surpass in boldness and ingenuity of design any of the creations of the modern yacht builder which are mistakenly regarded by some as having reached an absurd extreme. ”

“ If he is a student and has serious ambitions he represents the young salt of his nation, and the college brotherhood in general is a light shining in the darkness. Thus stumbling, groping, often misled by his natural leaders, he does somehow or other, through sheer force, acquire an education, and is just as surely coming to the front in the leadership of the American nation as the Oxford or Cambridge man is leading the British nation. ”

“ In order to illustrate the grateful services which palaeontology through restoration may render to the related earth sciences let us imagine a vast continent of the past wholly unknown in its physical features, elevation, climate, configuration, but richly represented by fossil remains. All the fossil plants and animals of every kind are brought from this continent into a great museum ”

“ Fitness is, therefore, the central thought of modern paleontology in its most comprehensive sense, as embracing fitness in the very remote past, in its evolution toward the present and in its tendencies for the future. Just as the uniformitarian method of Lyell transformed geology, so the uniformitarian method is penetrating paleontology and making observations of animal and plant life as it is to-day the basis of the understanding of animal and plant life as it was from the beginning. ”

“ In western Europe the Chellean culture certainly had a development all its own, adapted to a race of bold hunters who lived in the open and whose entire industry developed around the products of the chase. For them flint and quartzite took the place of bronze, iron, or steel. This culture marked a distinct and probably a very long epoch of time in which inventions and multiplications of form were gradually spread from tribe to tribe, exactly as modern inventions, usually originating at a single point and often in the mind of one ingenious individual, gradually spread over the world. ”

“ For nothing is surer than this, that the sense of truth must come as a daily personal experience in the life of the student through testing values for himself, as it does in the life of the scientist, the artist, the physician, the engineer, the merchant. ”

“ Just as we demand a continent to transfer land animals from Australia to South America, so we demand a natural law to explain these facts.
The creative factors of fitness cooperating with selection, which, in my judgment, are now well demonstrated, reside either primarily in the environment, in the bodies of animals, or in the germinal cells—they all ultimately find their way into the germinal cells. ”

“ No artists have ever had before them at the same time and in the same country such a wonderful panorama of animal life as that observed by the Crô-Magnons. Their representations in drawing, engraving, painting, and sculpture afford us a view of a great part of the life of the period, including its contingent of forms from the tundras, steppes, Alpine summits, and Eurasiatic forests and meadows, and the one surviving member of the Asiatic fauna, the lion. ”

“ True, the accumulated knowledge of what has been thought and said, serves as the gravity law which will keep you from flying off at a tangent. But no warning signals are needed, there is not the least danger that constructive thinking will drive you away from learning; it will much more surely drive you to it, with a deeply intensified reverence for your intellectual forebears; in fact, the eldest [Pg 32] offspring of centrifugal education is that keen and fresh appetite for knowledge which springs only from trying to add your own mite to it. ”

“ We have suffered some heavy personal losses, not only among the chiefs, but among the younger leaders of the science in recent years; Cope, Marsh, Zittel, Kowalevsky, Baur and Hatcher have gone, but they live in their works and their influence, which vary with the peculiar or characteristic genius of each.
As in every other branch of science, problems multiply like the heads of hydra; no sooner is one laid low than a number of new ones appear ”

“ This Palæolithic tour [A] of three weeks, accompanied as it was by a constant flow of conversation and discussion, made a very profound impression, namely, of the very early evolution of the spirit of man, of the close relation between early human environment and industry and the development of mind, of the remote antiquity of the human powers of observation, of discovery, and of invention. It appears that men with faculties and powers like our own, but in the infancy of education and tradition, were living in this region of Europe at least 25,000 years ago. ”

“ I believe the greatest fault of the American student lies in the over-development of one of his greatest virtues, namely, his collectivism. His strong esprit de corps patterns and moulds him too far. The rewards are for the 'lock-step' type of man who conforms to the prevailing ideals of his college. He must parade, he must cheer, to order. Individualism is at a discount; it debars a man from the social rewards of college life. ”

“ Paleontology as the history of life takes its place in the background of recorded history and archeology, and simply from the standpoint of the human pedigree is of transcendent interest. Although it has progressed far beyond the dreams of Darwin and Huxley, the first general statement which must be made is that the actual points of contact between the grand divisions of the animal and plant kingdom, as well as between the lesser and even many of the minor divisions, have yet to be discovered. ”

“ It is most important constantly to keep before our minds certain great principles of racial evolution: (1) that the development of a racial type, whether long-headed or broad-headed, narrow-faced or broad-faced, of tall or of short stature, must necessarily be very slow; (2) that this development of the races which invaded western Europe took place for the most part to the eastward in the vast continent of Asia and eastern Europe; (3) that, once established through a long process of isolation and separate evolution, these racial types are extremely stable and persistent ”

“ I sometimes think it would be better not to read the newspapers at all, even when they are conscientious, because of their lack of a sense of proportion, in the news columns at least, of the really important things in American life. Our most serious evening mentor of student manners and morals gives six columns to a football game and six lines to a great intercollegiate debate. Such is the difference between precept and practice. American laurels are for the giant captain of industry ”

“ To these people flint implements appear to be altogether of secondary importance; although the flints are very numerous, they are not finished with any of the perfection of the Solutrean technique; the laurel-leaf spear head and shouldered dart head have disappeared entirely, but a great variety of smaller graving and chasing forms are employed for fashioning the implements of bone and horn. What a contrast to the beautiful flints so finely retouched and of such carefully selected materials, found in the very same stations in middle and upper Solutrean layers! ”

“ Are you content to be a sort of psychic Sacculina, a vegetative animal, your mind a vast sack with two systems, one for the incurrent, the other for the outcurrent of predigested ideas? If so, all your mental organs of combat and locomotion will atrophy. Do you put your faith in reading, or in book knowledge? ”

“ The succeeding life period is that of the retreat of the tundra [Pg 450] and steppe mammals and of the increasing rarity of the reindeer and of the mammoth in southwestern Europe; it corresponds broadly with the returning cold and moist climate of the second Postglacial advance known in the Alps as the Gschnitz stage. With the spread of the forests and the retreat to the north of the reindeer, the principal source both of the supply of food and clothing and of all the bone implements of industry and of the chase, a new set of life conditions may have gradually become established. ”