Henry Fairfield Osborn

“ 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. ”

“ The paleontologist must also be a historian; he has to deal with lineage, with ancestors, he comes directly upon the problem of kinship or relationship, and he has to determine the various means of distinguishing the true from the apparent relationships. It happens that fitness, while fascinating in itself, has led even the most faithful and skilful into the most devious paths away from the truth. ”

“ With other physical sciences paleontology is hardly less intimate; from the physicist it demands time for the evolution of successive waves of organisms, from the geographer it demands continental connections or even whole continents for the passage of land animals and plants. As with geology, what it receives it is ever ready to return in gifts; the new branch of geography, for example, entitled paleogeography, appeals quite as often to the paleontologist as to the geologist for its data. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such an achievement as the reconstruction of a continent would be impossible in paleontology pursued as geology or as a logical subdivision of geology. The importance of the services which paleontology may render geology as time-keeper of the rocks, or which geology may render paleontology, are so familiar that we need not stop to enumerate them. ”

“ The whole tendency of paleontological discovery is to resolve what are apparently saltations or discontinuities into processes of continuous change. This, however, by no means precludes saltation from being a vera causa in past time, as rising from 'unknown' causes in the germ cells and as forming the materials from which nature may select the saltations which are adaptive from those which are inadaptive. The paleontologist has every reason to believe that he finds saltations in the sudden variations in the number of vertebra? ”

“ I do not wish to quarrel with my superior officers, but I must first record a protest against the fact that in the classification scheme of this congress, in the year of our Lord 1904, paleontology is bracketed as a division of geology. It is chiefly an accident of birth which has connected paleontology with geology; because fossils were first found in the rocks, geology the foster mother was mistaken for the true mother, zoology—a confusion in the birth records which Huxley did his best to correct. ”

“ There is positively much in common between the inductions derived from vertebrate and invertebrate evolution and I believe a great service would be rendered to biology by a philosophical comparison and contrast of the methods and results of vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology.
The science of vertebrate fossils is in an extremely healthy state at present. The devotees of the science were never more numerous, never more inspired and certainly never so united in aim as at present. ”

“ Whatever the origin, two great facts have been established: first, the modern mammals suddenly appear in the Lower Eocene (as distinguished from the basal Eocene, in which the Cretaceous mammals are found) , and second, they enjoy a more or less independent evolution and radiation on each of the four great continents. There thus arose the four peculiar or indigenous continental faunæ of South America, of North America, of Europe and Asia or Eurasia and of Africa. Of these South America was by far the most isolated and unique in its animal life. ”

“ In the Jurassic period there were altogether no less than six orders of reptiles which had independently abandoned terrestrial life and acquired more or less perfect adaptation to aquatic life. Nature, limited in her resources of outfitting for aquatic life, fashioned so many of these animals into like form, it is small wonder that only within the last two years have we finally distinguished all the similarities of analogous habit from the similarities of real kinship. ”

“ Rapid exploration and discovery, however, are not the only symptoms of health in a science; we do not aim to pass down to history as great collectors; we must accumulate conceptions and ideas as rapidly a? we accumulate materials; it will be a reproach to our generation if we do not advance as far beyond the intellectual status of Cuvier, Owen, Huxley and Cope as we advance beyond their material status in the way of collections of fossils. We must thoroughly understand where we are in the science, how we are doing our thinking, what we are aiming to accomplish ”

“ Similarly, I regard mutation as a quite distinct phenomenon, and as par excellence the contribution of the paleontological method; it is the gradual rise of new adaptive characters neither by the selection of accidental variations nor by saltation, but by origin in an obscure and almost invisible form, followed by "direct increase and development in successive generations until a stage of actual usefulness is reached, where perhaps selection may begin to operate. ”

“ Adaptive Modification.—This is a plastic principle which tends in the course of life to an increasing fitness of the bodies of individuals to their special environments and habits, well illustrated among men in the influence of various trades and occupations and operating both in active and in passive structures. Consistent with the adaptive modification principle is the fact that every individual requires habit and environment to model it into its parental form; and in every change of environment or habit every individual is carried an infinitesimal degree beyond the parental form ”

“ We see far more clearly than Huxley did the force of this idea. Owen, Cope, Scott, Fraas and many others', under the terms 'parallelism' 'convergence,' 'homoplasy' have developed the force of the old Aristotelian notion that analogy is a similarity of habit, and that in the course of evolution a similarity of habit finally results in a close or exact similarity of structure; this similarity of structure is mistaken as an evidence of kinship. Analogous evolution does not stop in its far reaching consequences with analogies in organs ”

“ We are no longer content, however, with these approaches to actual contact and genetic kinship, we have toiled so long both by discovery and by the elimination of one error after another, and are so near the promised land, we can hardly restrain our impatience. I venture to predict that the contact of the Amphibia with the fishes will be found either in America or Europe. ”

“ No such prediction could be safely made regarding the connecting form between the amphibians and reptiles, because America, Eurasia and Africa all show in contemporaneous deposits evidence that such connection may be discovered at any time. The transformation from reptiles to birds will probably be -found in the Permian of America or Eurasia; chances of connecting the mammals with the reptiles are decidedly brightest in South Africa; while in Europe, or more probably in Asia, we shall connect man with generalized catarhine primates. ”

“ Migration and animal intercommunication between North America and Eurasia was very frequent. The history of these nine orders of mammals in North America and Eurasia developed as follows: Certain families indigenous to North America both evolved and remained here, others finally migrated into Europe and South America. Similarly Eurasia had its continuous evolution into forms which remained at home as well as into those which finally migrated into North America and even into South America. ”

“ It has been rendered possible only by the wonderful advance in the understanding of the adaptation of the living to the lifeless forces of the planet. Finally, it is obvious in such a projection of the physical from the purely biological that the degree of accuracy reached will represent the present state of the science and the extent of its approach toward the final goal of being an exact or complete science. ”

“ The laughing remark of Cope on seeing a newly discovered specimen which controverted one of his hypotheses, 'if no one were watching I should be glad to throw that fossil out of the window,' has a serious reality in our often unconscious protection of our own opinions. ”

“ We still read with equal clearness the physical or environmental changes of past times in the biological mirror, a mirror often unburnished and incomplete, owing to the interruptions in the paleontological records, but constantly becoming more polished as our knowledge of life and its all pervading relations to the non-life becomes more extensive and more profound. ”

“ The high degree of fitness for different habits, or radiation, of the Anomodonts is distinguished from that of any other reptiles at any time by its numerous analogies to the radiation of the mammals, namely, into very large and very small forms, into carnivorous and herbivorous, into terrestrial and possibly into aquatic types; in fact, some of these animals, if seen on land to-day might readily be mistaken for mammals. ”

“ Amid this repetition on a grand scale of similar adaptations, which is altogether comparable to what we know as having occurred over and over again in human history, the paleontologist as a historian must keep constantly before him the second great idea of homogeny, of real ancestral kinship, of direct blood descent and hereditary relationship. ”

“ The search for the primitive central form is always made by the same method of reasoning, a method which was first clearly outlined by Huxley, namely, by the more or less ideal reconstruction of the primitive central form from which radiation has occurred. This is a very difficult matter where the primitive central form is not preserved either living or as a fossil. ”

“ Mutation.—These new characters are also germinal in origin, because they appear in the teeth, which are structures fully formed beneath the surface before they pierce the gum, and therefore not subsequently modeled by adaptive modification, as the bones, muscles and all the other tissues of the body are. Mutations are found arising according to partly known influences of kinship. They do not, so far as we observe, possess adaptive value when they first appear, but then frequently, if not always, develop into a stage of usefulness. ”

“ In the many familiar cases of the abbreviation or elongation of the vertebral column in adaptation to certain habits, a vertebra in the middle of a series can not dwindle out of existence, it must suddenly drop out or suddenly appear. ”