The preceding arguments make no particular claim to novelty; indeed they have been floating more or less distinctly before the minds of geologists for the last thirty years; and if, at the present time, it has seemed desirable to give them more definite and systematic expression, it is because palaeontology is every day assuming a greater importance, and now requires to rest on a basis the firmness of which is thoroughly well assured.  Among its fundamental conceptions, there must be no confusion between what is certain and what is more or less probable.[33] But, pending the construction of a surer foundation than palaeontology now possesses, it may be instructive, assuming for the nonce the general correctness of the ordinary hypothesis of geological contemporaneity, to consider whether the deductions which are ordinarily drawn from the whole body of palaeontological facts are justifiable.

The evidence on which such conclusions are based is of two kinds, negative and positive.  The value of negative evidence, in connexion with this inquiry, has been so fully and clearly discussed in an address from the chair of this Society,[34] which none of us have forgotten, that nothing need at present be said about it; the more, as the considerations which have been laid before you have certainly not tended to increase your estimation of such evidence.  It will be preferable to turn to the positive facts of palaeontology, and to inquire what they tell us.

We are all accustomed to speak of the number and the extent of the changes in the living population of the globe during geological time as something enormous; and indeed they are so, if we regard only the negative differences which separate the older rocks from the more modern, and if we look upon specific and generic changes as great changes, which from one point of view they truly are.  But leaving the negative differences out of consideration, and looking only at the positive data furnished by the fossil world from a broader point of view—­from that of the comparative anatomist who has made the study of the greater modifications of animal form his chief business—­a surprise of another kind dawns upon the mind; and under this aspect the smallness of the total change becomes as astonishing as was its greatness under the other.

There are two hundred known orders of plants; of these not one is certainly known to exist exclusively in the fossil state.  The whole lapse of geological time has as yet yielded not a single new ordinal type of vegetable structure.[35]

The positive change in passing from the recent to the ancient animal world is greater, but still singularly small.  No fossil animal is so distinct from those now living as to require to be arranged even in a separate class from those which, contain existing forms.  It is only when we come to the orders, which may be roughly estimated at about a hundred and thirty, that we meet with fossil animals so distinct from those now living as to require orders for themselves; and these do not amount, on the most liberal estimate, to more than about 10 per cent, of the whole.