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THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY |.
a BULLETIN I—UMBERS1.
16,967

ADDRESSES

yi DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE
DEDICATION OF THE NEW MUSEUM
BUILDING, 29 DECEMBER 1925

NEW HAVEN
THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

YALE UNIVERSITY

1926
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PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Aj A \ | TRUSTEES

Epwarp Sauissury Dana, Pxu.D., Chairman.

THE GoveRNOoR OF CONNECTICUT, e@ Officio.

JAMES Rowitanp ANGELL, PH.D., Lirt.D., LL.D.
Cuartes Scnucuert, LL.D., Secretary.

Ross Granvit_eE Harrison, Pu.D., M.D., Sc.D.
Lewis H. Ene.isu.

AvBerT Barretr Merepitn, Pp.D., L.H.D., LL.D.

DIRECTOR

Ricuarp Swann Lutt, Px.D., Sc.D.

CURATORS

Westry Roswext Cor, Pu.D., Curator of Zoology.
Witiiam Esenezer Forp, Pu.D., Curator of Mineralogy.

RicHarp Swann Lutz, Pu.D., Sc.D., Curator of Vertebrate Pale-
ontology.

Grorce Grant MacCurpy, Px.D., Curator of Anthropology.

CHarites Scuucuert, LL.D., Curator of Invertebrate Paleon-
tology.

Cart OwEn Dunpar, Pu.D., Assistant Curator of Invertebrate
Paleontology.

Matcotm RutHerrorp TxHorret, Pu.D., Assistant Curator of
Vertebrate Paleontology, and Research Associate in Pale-
ontology.

DOCENT

Ereanore Woopwarp Parmeter, M.A.

PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, YALE UNIVERSITY

THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
BULLETIN I—NUMBER 1

ADDRESSES

DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE
DEDICATION OF THE NEW MUSEUM
BUILDING, 29 DECEMBER 1925

NEW HAVEN
THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
YALE UNIVERSITY
1926

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CONTENTS

Presentation of the Building to the University
Epwarp SALisBsuryY Dana

Acceptance JaMES Rowianp ANGELL

The Rise of Natural History Museums in the United States
CHARLES SCHUCHERT

The Origin of Species, 1859-1925 Henry FarrFrietp Osporn

PRESENTATION OF THE BUILDING

BY EDWARD SALISBURY DANA

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, PEABODY MUSEUM

Mr. President, Fellow Trustees, Ladies, and Gentlemen:

T is the privilege of the Chairman of the Board of ‘Trustees

to turn over to you, Mr. President, this Museum Building
and all it contains for the future service of the University. We
thank you, Sir, for the constant support and encouragement
which you have given us in planning for and developing this
new home for the scientific collections of Yale in Geology and
Natural History.

When you, ladies and gentlemen, pass through the rooms of
this building, you cannot fail to appreciate, at least in part,
the labors of the Director, Professor R. S. Lull, and each of
the Curators in planning the arrangement of the cases and of
the specimens they contain. We thank them all cordially.

Our thanks are due also to the active members of the staff
for the untiring zeal and energy with which they have devoted
themselves—first, to the transfer of the specimens from the
numerous places in which they have been in retirement for
more than seven years; and, also, to their installation in this
new building. What has been accomplished in little more than
a year may well excite the. admiration of those who have
favored us with their presence to-day. To the architect, Mr.
Klauder, we extend our thanks for the care with which he met
all the often difficult requirements of the situation.

It is with much confidence that we look forward to the
future, estimate the certain growth of the collections, and con-
sider the service which they will render to Science, to the Uni-
versity, and to the City in which the Peabody Museum has had
its home for more than half a century.

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ACCEPTANCE OF THE BUILDING

BY JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL

PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY

N behalf of Yale University, I accept with pride and

gratitude this building so skillfully designed to serve its
great purposes. Here, for generations to come, serious students
will assemble for the intensive study of those profound and
revealing chapters in nature’s history which are here written.
Hither will come citizens young and old to gain broader and
deeper conceptions of the history of life, of the earth and its
structure and its place in the cosmos. Most important perhaps
of all, here will go constantly forward the search for new truth,
whose discovery is the abundant reward of those who seek by
unflagging study to unlock the hidden secrets of nature. This
building may well be called a temple of learning, for such it is
to all who use it.

To the Director and the members of the Museum staff who
have so patiently endured their years of wandering in the
wilderness and who have so splendidly installed the collections
in their new home, to the architects and builders, and to all who
have contributed by thought or deed to make this day possible,
we voice our grateful appreciation.

But it is in no spirit of complacent content that we view
the completion of this edifice. Ours is the spirit of eager resolu-
tion for the future, in the realization that the Peabody Mu-
seum is a dynamic center from which must flow continual serv-
ice to science and so to humanity. We are opening a new
chapter in the history of the University and of the sciences
which are here represented. The opportunities which now lie
before us intrigue the imagination and inspire our resolution
to press forward to ever larger and more significant accom-
plishment. Only so shall we be quite worthy of that great

8 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

philanthropic figure, George Peabody, whose generous vision
fifty-nine years ago made possible this structure, and of his
nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh, whose illustrious achievements,
together with those of many other distinguished scientists, have
given this Museum its great collections and its prestige in the
world of science. We hope and believe that all who appreciate
the unlimited possibilities of this institution will, by their sup-
port, enable us to realize its fullest usefulness.

THE
RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS
IN THE UNITED STATES

BY CHARLES SCHUCHERT

SHCRETARY OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES AND
CURATOR OF INVERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY, PEABODY MUSEUM

O the speaker, after long years of prayerful waiting, this

day is an especially happy one, when we are dedicating
to the people, to all who are willing to learn, and even to those
who come solely for intellectual amusement, this rearisen tem-
ple first founded in 1866 by George Peabody to house the Yale
collections in paleontology, mineralogy, and zoology. George
Peabody was a farmer’s son of Danvers, Massachusetts, who
through mercantile pursuits came to be an international
banker, and was the first American Creesus to give away mil-
lions of dollars to better the homes of the poor in London, and
to educate the people of the United States. May his spirit, and
that of his great nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh, for whom
he gave this foundation, be with us this day!

“Some think that a museum is an institution for the benefit
of the few; really it is the people’s true university, whose scope
is infinitely broader than that of the most learned institutions.
In a museum, he who cannot even read, may learn something,
the student can find the material on which his studies are based,
and the professor may carry on his work of research.” These
are the words of one of America’s best museum directors,
Frederic A. Lucas, who, like myself, got his first lessons from
that great master of natural history museums, G. Brown
Goode. Doctor Goode was at the head of the United States
National Museum from 1881 to 1897, and from him came
much of our philosophy about museums, their history, and
what they should stand for in our national life. A museum, he

10 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

believed, should be “tone of the chief agencies of the higher
civilization—a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest
attention to system.” An efficient educational museum “should
be a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-
selected specimen,” since, by such exhibitions, the museum
“cultivates the powers of observation.”

A museum cannot, however, stop with these aspirations, but
should soar high into the domain of research. With Doctor
Goode we again agree that ‘“‘No museum can do good and be
respected which does not each year give additional proof of
its claims to be considered a center of learning.” It should
have “tens of thousands of specimens, interesting only to the
specialist, hidden away perpetually from public view, but
necessary for proper scientific research” and special educa-
tion. And pray why? Because they are “the foundations of the
intellectual superstructure which gives to the institution its
proper standing.”

Such is our modern conception of a museum, but the idea
has been of slow growth through the centuries. Doctor Goode
tells us that the word museum arose during the golden age of
the Greeks, meaning at first the home of the nine muses who
presided over the arts and sciences. The museums of the Greeks
“were in the groves of Parnassus and Helicon, and later they
were temples in various parts of Hellas.” Four centuries before
Christ, Aristotle “must have had a great museum of natural

history.” Soon, however, the meaning of the word changed,
and at the palace of Alexandria it was applied to that portion
which was “set apart for the study of the sciences, and which
contained the famous Alexandrian Library. The museum of
Alexandria was a great university, the abiding place of men
of science and letters, who were divided into many companies
or colleges.”

Then came the awful and wilful destruction of the Alexan-
drian Museum, the political and intellectual downfall of Greece
and Rome, the plundering and overrunning of the advanced
peoples by the northern barbarians, and everywhere the rising

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS i

of religious fervors in Christianity and Mohammedanism. With
these impelling motives, the idea of museums and universities
dropped out of use from the fourth to the sixteenth century,
and over Europe fell the pall of the Dark Ages. With the
Renaissance during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, it
began to be fashionable again to make collections of art,
letters, and “curiosities.”

The discovery of the Americas led to their exploration for
natural wealth, and objects of natural history, mainly plants
and animals, were also gathered and sent home, chiefly to Eng-
land, for study. Hans Sloane, of London, accumulated such
materials, and in 1749 he bequeathed large collections of them
to the English nation, a stimulus that led Parliament in 1753
to pass an act establishing the British Museum in London.
The oldest existing public museum of natural history, how-
ever, is the Ashmolean of Oxford, dating from 1667, out of
whose collections the antiquarian Edward Lhuyd illustrated “a
thousand fossils.” The explorations in the New World, then,
had much to do with the originating of natural history mu-
seums in England, and thence the idea spread to America.

Doctor Goode tells us further that in the early days of the
American republic our principal cities “had each a public
museum, founded and supported [however] by private enter-
prise.” The oldest of these, described as a “curious collection
of American birds and insects,” was at Norwalk, Connecticut,
where it had been founded by a man named Arnold prior to
the Revolution. Among the museums of to-day the oldest of
these private enterprises is the Charleston Museum, which was
started in 1773 by the local Library Society. In 1815 it re-
ceived some support from both the state and the city, but such
help was not regularly given until 1850. In 1824 the local
Courier said editorially: “A public museum is as necessary an
appendage to a city as a public newspaper or a public library.”
Even as far back as 1826 this museum was open evenings,
when it was “brilliantly illuminated.”

In the early days of America, it was the rule that museums

12 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

were of societal origin, and of these there is another in flourish-
ing condition. This is the East India Marine Hall started in
1799 at Salem, Massachusetts, and combined in 1867 with the
Essex Institute, begun in 1834, to form the Peabody Academy
of Science, to which our patron also presented $140,000 for a
building and its upkeep.

The first botanical garden in this country was established
by John Bartram in 1728 at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia,
but it was the many-sided Franklin who made the City of
Brotherly Love itself the first scientific center in America.
Franklin established himself as editor and proprietor of the
Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, in 1731 he started the first
circulating library, and the following year began the publica-
tion of Poor Richard’s Almanac. The year 1743 is more mo-
mentous to us on this occasion, however, for then Franklin
organized the College of Pennsylvania and the American
Philosophical Society, although the latter was not in a flourish-
ing condition until 1769. Another self-made Philadelphian was
David Rittenhouse, who constructed his own astronomic equip-
ment in 1770 and was the first American to own an observatory
and to be a professor of astronomy. The first fine arts museum,
which is still quite active, also found its original home in Phila-
delphia in 1805 under the name of the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts. Not strange, then, that in this same intellectual
mecca arose the greatest of the older public, though privately
owned, natural history museums, the “Philadelphia Museum,”
established in 1785 by the American portrait painter, Charles
Willson Peale, and continuing its useful career for nearly fifty
years. For a time Peale’s museum was housed in the building
of the American Philosophical Society, and in 1800 it was full
of popular attractions:

“There were a mammoth’s tooth from the Ohio, and a
woman’s shoe from Canton; nests of the kind used to make
soup of, and a Chinese fan six feet long; bits of asbestos, belts
of wampum, stuffed birds and feathers from the Friendly Is-
lands, scalps, tomahawks, and long lines of portraits of great

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 13

men of the Revolutionary War. To visit the museum, to wander
through the rooms, play upon the organ, examine the rude
electrical machine, and have a profile drawn by the physiog-
nomitian, were pleasures from which no stranger to the city
ever refrained.”

One of the first divisions of natural history to come into
prominence was mineralogy, which once included fossils (then
regarded as stones shaped under the influence of the celestial
bodies), and out of which was to develop the whole complex
of geological sciences. Pope Sixtus V had such a collection in
the Vatican, and it was described and excellently figured by
Mercati in 1574. The real establishment of mineralogy as a
science, however, was the work of Abraham Gottlob Werner,
professor in the School of Mines at Freiberg, Saxony, who did
for mineralogy what Linneus had done for botany and zoology.
His teaching was marked by such enthusiasm and dramatic
certainty that to him flocked, from 1775 to 1817, students from
all parts of Europe and a few even from America. In London,
the first to teach mineralogy was Professor Schmeisser, a pupil
of Werner, and from him David Hosack, a New Yorker, got
the knowledge of minerals that led him to bring back home with
him in 1794 the first large collection of minerals ever seen in
this country. It was shown in New York for many years, and
in 1817 Hosack presented it to Princeton, since which time
there has been a museum at this seat of learning. At Harvard,
Doctor Benjamin Waterhouse had “about half a peck of min-
erals” as far back as 1784, but its Mineral Cabinet was actually
begun in 1793 with the several gifts made by Doctor Lettson,
amounting to something like 700 specimens. By 1820, the
Cabinet was housed in a room 45 by 36 feet, and twenty years
later had about 36,000 specimens of minerals, rocks, and
fossils.

The first American fossil was described by no less a person-
age than the “Great Democrat,” Thomas Jefferson, who, in
addition to being president of the United States, found time
to head the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia,

14 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

and as well to become our first government paleontologist,
keeping in the White House in the Quaker City upward of
three hundred fossil bones, mostly mastodon, gathered by Gen-
eral William Clarke at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.

The largest of the early public and research museums of
natural history that still continue is that of the Academy of
Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, begun in 1812 by a society
of citizens, when the city had about 54,000 inhabitants. As we
have seen, Peale’s “‘Philadelphia Museum” was its forerunner
and in 1812 was not only greater but more popular, since here
could be seen the “‘calf with five legs” and the “child without
ears.” 'The Academy at first grew slowly, but when Peale’s
Museum went out of existence in 1835, the former not only had
the leading public museum in America, but was even more
renowned as a research institute, since it had then the best
library on natural history in the country. This position of
preéminence it retained until the eighteen-eighties, when the
Smithsonian Institution with its United States National Mu-
seum took the ascendency.

In 1817, thirty-one gentlemen in New York City organized
themselves into a Lyceum of Natural History, and for nearly
fifty years this institution, we are told by its historian, Pro-
fessor Fairchild, “filled a place in this city as prominent and
as useful for its time as the collections in the American Museum
of Natural History do for New York of the present day.” On
the night of May 21, 1866, however, the collections (but not
the library) were destroyed by fire, and though the Society is
still in existence under another name, and still publishing, it
never again had a museum. Its place was taken in 1869, and
more especially after 1874, by what has since become one of
the largest, if not the largest, natural history museum, the
American Museum of Natural History, now so wonderfully
prosperous under the presidency of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

A museum of natural history founded primarily for research
had its origin at Harvard University in 1848 with the appoint-
ment of Louis Agassiz as professor of zoology and geology. At

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 15

first, the collections belonged to Agassiz, but they were even-
tually purchased by the University. In 1859 was erected the
first wing of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which
Agassiz intended “should rival those of the Old World,” but
which was still, in 1867, in the words of his son Alexander,
“nothing but a huge storehouse for collections.” The elder
Agassiz’s intentions have since been fulfilled, however, largely
through the efforts of this same son, who told us in 1902 that
the Harvard Museum then had cost in buildings, collections,
and library more than $1,250,000, with invested funds of
about $900,000. Its zoological collections are vast, and those
of botany, ethnology, and mineralogy very large, making it the
richest in materials and facility for study in these subjects of
any American institution of learning. Although it is primarily
a research museum, it has had since 1902 about two acres of
floor space devoted to exhibition collections and open daily to
the public.

The idea of a national museum sustained out of public funds
came later in our history, and even then had its origin in the
private bequest made for that purpose by an Englishman,
James Smithson. His gift of more than a half million dollars
and of a small collection of minerals to establish an institution
“for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” was
accepted by Congress in 1846. Even so, the actual establish-
ment of the National Museum did not occur until 1875, and
the funds for its running first came into the Congressional
appropriations of 1878. The building was opened to the public
in 1881, and now a still newer building, completed in 1911, is
one of the largest of its kind in the world, with a floor space of
468,000 square feet, or nearly eleven acres. In the new Peabody
Museum at Yale we have less than two acres of floor space.

With this brief sketch of the rise of museums in America,
concomitant with the growth of the sciences, it next becomes
of interest to see what part Yale had in this history. Here
again, as at Cambridge, and at Philadelphia, the story centers
around one man. With the Class of 1796, there was graduated

16 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

from Yale College a youth of twenty-three, Benjamin Silliman,
known to his classmates as “Sober Ben,” a native of Fairfield
in this state, destined for the profession of law. He had, indeed,
passed the Connecticut Bar, when President Dwight, with an
insight into “vocational” psychology that would do credit to
the most advanced foundations of to-day, laid his hand upon
the young man and appointed him professor of chemistry and
natural history. To prepare for these unexpected duties, Silli-
man gathered up what ores and minerals he could find in the
college, and packing them in a “candle box,” hied himself to
Philadelphia to study chemistry and anatomy under Wistar,
the natural sciences under Woodhouse, and to have his minerals
named by Adam Seybert, then recently returned from the
fount of wisdom at Freiberg.

The Yale Cabinet of Minerals, originating thus in the tradi-
tional “candle box” brought back by Silliman in 1803, was
greatly enlarged through the purchase, four years later, of
the collection owned by a bookseller, B. D. Perkins. The next
notable addition to it fell literally from the skies—the meteorite
seen to descend near Weston, Connecticut, on December 14,
1807. Silliman at once followed up the report of this “fall”
and brought back for his Cabinet several of the stones, about
which he published in the following year a full account, in
collaboration with Professor Kingsley. This was the first scien-
tific description of the mineral nature of one of these “chips
of other worlds” and of the phenomena attending upon its fall,
and therefore attracted much attention, so much, in fact, that
Jefferson is reputed to have said: “It is easier to believe that
two Yankee professors will lie than to admit that stones can
fall from Heaven.” The collection of meteorites at Yale now
numbers about 300 falls, and is one of the few larger collections
in the country.

In this same year, Silliman, seeing the collection of minerals
brought together by Colonel George Gibbs, then the largest
and most valuable lot of European minerals ever brought to
America, determined to get it also for Yale. He succeeded in

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 17

having it deposited in New Haven, where its 12,000 specimens
were fully arranged on the second floor at the north end of
Old South Middle, now Connecticut Hall. Here several stu-
dents’ rooms were transformed into a museum 40 by 18 feet,
and here, beginning with 1813, Silliman taught mineralogy
and geology. The museum idea was now an established fact, for
Curator E. 8. Dana said in 1878: “For upward of fifty years
the ‘Mineral Cabinet’ has been one of the chief attractions con-
nected with the town, which every friend of the college from
abroad felt bound to visit.”” It became, indeed, the nucleus
around which the art and natural history museums were to
grow.

Silliman’s influence, however, reached far beyond the bounds
of mineralogy. He had a warm and impressive personality,
making him a good leader and a great teacher, and in conse-
quence his students caught his enthusiasm and made much use
of the Mineral Cabinet. As a popular lecturer he was known
from Boston to St. Louis. His inspiring delivery has been
described in lively fashion by one of his students, Abraham
Sager, as follows:

“Perfectly at home among the wreck and ruins of the world,
in either hand balancing a flood of waters and a lake of fire
before his respectable and attentive auditors, he stands like
some kind but mighty spirit sent to instill into the minds of
the rising generation the sublime but awful mysteries of the
past creation, himself filled to bursting nigh with the majesty
and grandeur of the subject.”

As an organizer, Silliman was also preéminent, being active
in the formation of the first American Geological Society, the
Yale Medical School, and the School of the Fine Arts growing
out of the Trumbull Gallery opened at Yale in 1832, and in
the establishment and long maintenance single-handed of that
venerable periodical, the American Journal of Science, which
“did a service to science, the value of which is beyond estimate.”

Silliman’s ablest student was James Dwight Dana, later his
son-in-law, who, after a voyage around the world with the

18 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Wilkes Expedition, was in 1850 appointed professor of natu-
ral history at Yale, retaining the chair until 1890, although
the title was changed in 1864 to professor of geology and
mineralogy. He is said to have been “the foremost geologist in
America and one of the foremost of the world.” His contribu-
tion to the Yale Museum was the building of a teaching collec-
tion in historical geology, large additions to the mineralogi-
eal collections, and later a long term of devoted service as
chairman of the Peabody Museum Trustees. His work in the
latter two lines was carried on notably by his son, Edward S.
Dana, who was curator of mineralogy from 1874 to 1922, and
has been since 1899 chairman of the Museum Trustees.

With the collections at Yale already of considerable size,
there entered the College with the Class of 1860 another youth,
who was to complete the work of Silliman by bringing the Yale
collections a home, adding to them enormously, and making the
institution renowned for its scientific treasures abroad as well
as at home. Othniel Charles Marsh was the son of an indus-
trious farmer who had moved from his ancestral home in Dan-
vers, Massachusetts, to the western part of New York, at a
time when the Erie Canal was in process of construction. The
fossils thrown out by the workmen in this undertaking at-
tracted the attention of both father and son, and under the
guidance of Colonel Jewett, a local collector, the boy became so
interested in them that he lost his taste for farming. He was
bent on getting an education, and with this in view, a maternal
aunt enlisted in his behalf the good will of her brother, Mr.
George Peabody, the great international banker, then living in
London. This gentleman’s liberality sent the boy to Andover,
and finally to Yale. During his courses at both places he con-
tinued his strong interest in mineralogy, and this devotion to
scientific matters aroused the interest of his uncle, who visited
him at New Haven when he was an undergraduate. After
graduation he remained two years longer at Yale as a Scholar
of the House, studying mineralogy, geology, and chemistry,
and taking the master’s degree in 1862. He was offered a pro-

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 19

fessorship by his Alma Mater in 1863, but refused it, choosing
rather to make his first European trip, visiting museums and
studying at Heidelberg, at Berlin, where he began the re-
searches in paleontology that were to mean so much to Yale,
and at Breslau. He was already, therefore, well advanced in
his subject when he finally accepted the chair of paleontology
in 1866.

Coincident with his appointment came the generous dona-
tion from George Peabody of $150,000 to establish at Yale
a museum of natural history, to be devoted especially to geol-
ogy, mineralogy, and zoology. Of this gift, not more than
$100,000 was to be used in the erection of a building, which
for good reason was delayed until 1874 and completed in 1876.
In the meantime, the building fund had increased, making
possible a building that cost, with its equipment, about $175,-
000, and leaving intact the original building fund of $20,000,
and $30,000 for the care and increase of the collections. Now
there was 30,000 square feet of floor space available, the first
floor devoted to mineralogy and lecture rooms, the second to
paleontology, and the third to zoology.

The chair of paleontology to which Marsh was appointed in
1866 was the first to be created in any institution, and it was
almost wholly one of research. Marsh had collected fossils long
before his graduation from Yale, and after taking his doctor-
ate at Heidelberg, his interest centered upon the wonderful
array of extinct vertebrates that the United States Geological
and Geographical Survey of the Territories was finding in the
“bad lands” of Nebraska. He began collecting for himself in
the West in 1868, and from this time on to about 1892 the
annual fall flood of boxes shipped to the University grew
greater and greater. He brought forth in rapid succession in
the American Journal of Science “so many astonishing things
that the unexpected became the rule.” At least 400 new species
in 185 new genera were described in abbreviated form, and at
the age of sixty-one years he was struggling on, thinking that
somehow he could yet describe the great mass of still unknown

20 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

animals assembled in the Museum and make all of them fully
known in large monographs. Seven years later, in 1899, the
Great Reaper took him, with his work still undone, but every-
thing that he had not already given to Yale was found in his
will to be bequeathed to the University. As his epitaph says:
“To Yale he gave his services, his collections, and his estate.”
His great collections were his chief thought, and for their
further description he left $30,000 to the University. To
Marsh, then, Yale owes most that she has of greatness in
paleontology.

Professor Charles E. Beecher took up the work after
Marsh’s death, and did what Marsh could not bring himself to
do, namely, show the public in mounted form some of the
strange animals of antiquity. It was Beecher who first set up
the bones of a dinosaur on its own legs, and the Trachodon
skeleton at the north end of the Great Hall was the first one of
a series that has now become familiar to all who have visited
the museums of this country. Beecher, moreover, was an in-
vertebrate paleontologist, and strengthened that end of the
Museum. Long before his death in 1904, the exhibition collec-
tions had outgrown the building.

Turning now from the life of the past to that of the present,
Yale made another fortunate choice for the Museum in the
appointment in 1864 to her professorship of zoology of Addi-
son EK. Verrill, a student and assistant of the great Agassiz,
who had caught the enthusiasm of his master for the building
of zoological collections. When he came to Yale, zoology was
unrepresented in the collections then at hand, but his dredg-
ings off the New England coast during the summer months,
and especially after 1871, when he was placed in charge of the
steamers of the United States Fish Commission, soon started
the zoological collections to growing with the speed of the
paleontological ones. Most of this material eventually had to
go to Washington, but Verrill had the privilege of retaining
at Yale a complete series of the marine collections off our
coasts. Among the university collections of living animals, Yale

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 21

stands second only to Harvard, and her collections have many
of the type specimens described by Verrill. In all of this work,
Verrill was ably seconded by Professor Sidney I. Smith.

In the gift of George Peabody, no provision was made for a
Department of Anthropology, but Professor Marsh began to
make such collections as early as 1870, intending that they be
essentially of the North American aborigines. All of his col-
lectors were instructed to secure material relating to the North
American Indian, and Marsh himself did the same while
gathering fossil vertebrates in the wilds of the great West. At
the same time he purchased many an archeological collection,
reaching out to the Central American primitive peoples as well.
By 1877 this department was recognized by the Yale Corpora-
tion, and in 1902 it was put in charge of Curator MacCurdy,
who still holds the same position.

The early years of the twentieth century passed somewhat
uneventfully for the Museum. New material came in gradually,
and the staff worked away at the collections, disheartened often
when it seemed that our constant pleas for more space were
unheeded. Of what use to have a 70 foot dinosaur, if his cry
for room to move his cramped limbs fell on deaf ears, even
when set to verse in the Alwmni Weekly? We had long been
promised that when we should build, it would not be on the old
site, but on the Pierson-Sage Square, and tentative plans had
been made looking toward such a new building. When the move
was actually made, however, it was due to pressure from a
totally unexpected quarter.

On the memorable Christmas Eve of 1916, the Treasurer of
the University came to the speaker full of the great news of
the Harkness gift of a magnificent new quadrangle of build-
ings, and asking our help to make it possible by the removal
of the Peabody Museum from its stand of over forty years at
the corner of Elm and High streets. His words are still ringing
in my ears, and I hear him say: “If you can bring this about,
the present Peabody Museum building fund of $250,000 will
be increased to $750,000, bearing interest at the usual univer-

a

22 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

sity rate, along with more land than the Peabody ‘Trustees now
have on the Pierson-Sage Square.” It was truly to be a grand
Christmas present for the Museum, but, he added, “To get this
gift the Museum building must be erased and the property
ready for the Memorial Quadrangle by July next!” I said:
“Do you mean that we are to begin moving at once, go for
two years into storage, and then move again into a new build-
ing?’? He nodded assent. I then asked him if he had not heard
that “three moves are as good as a fire.”” We laughed a “‘good-
night,” but the consequence of that meeting was that the seem-
ingly impossible conditions were fulfilled, and the wreckers
began the demolition of the old Peabody Museum on the date
appointed.

The expectation had been that we would have to wait but
two years for a new building, and our material was accordingly
stored in fifteen different places, with only a portion of it
accessible for use in the Osborn Laboratories, which offered a
home to the staff that was thankfully accepted, and is remem-
bered with gratitude. Then President Wilson put us into the
Great War, and before the memorable year of 1917 was at an
end, the purchasing power of our funds had decreased to fifty
cents on the dollar! Instead of two years, seven long years of
gloom and confinement were our portion, and before the end
of this period the speaker had become emeritus and shifted the
burden to younger shoulders.

It is, indeed, a far cry from the Silliman “candle box” of
minerals to the surroundings in which we find ourselves to-day.
For our progress through the years we have to thank not only
those whose names have been mentioned, but a host of others,
who have added to our treasures by gifts, both large and
small, or have by their labors made our collections better
known. Nor are we forgetful of the fostering care of Mother
Yale, who deals as best she can with the demands of her brood
of clamoring children. May we make full use of the wonderful
opportunities that open before us, since our “chariot is now
hitched to a star”! In the words of Harvey Maitland Watts,

RISE OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 23

read by President Dixon on the occasion of the centennial of

the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia:

Great God of nature, let these halls
The hidden things of earth make plain;
Let knowledge trumpet forth her calls,
And wisdom speak, but not in vain.

Help us to read with humble mind
Thy larger scriptures day by day—
True bread of life! O be thou kind,
If, erring, we should go astray.

For deep resounding unto deep,
Declares the wonders of thy plan;

Life struggling from its crystal sleep
Finds glorious goal at last in man.

The mysteries of the eternal laws

Are but the shadows of thy might.
God, ruling all in final cause,

Enshrine the world in love and light!

‘ &
febhi? thay
Vy eee) di
ey mo Ula nays
J
few
Ai
a)
{
ri

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925*

BY HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

HON. SC.D. YALE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

CUVIERIAN

Cuvier nest-il pas le plus grand poéte de notre siécle? Lord Byron a
bien reproduit par des mots quelques agitations morales; mais notre
immortel naturaliste a reconstruit des mondes avec des os blanchis, a
rebati, comme Cadmus, des cités avec des dents, a repeuplé mille foréts
de tous les mystéres de la zoologie avec quelques fragments de houille,
a retrouvé des populations de géants dans le pied d’un mammouth. Ces
figures se dressent, grandissent et meublent des régions en harmonie
avec leur statures colossales.

Honore pe Bauzac: La Peau de Chagrin.

DARWINIAN

Variation, when we observe it carefully, appears to be aimless. The
transmission of acquired characters is unproven, and must certainly be
incredibly slow in most cases, if it does occur. We may justifiably adopt
the working hypothesis that evolution has been due solely to fortuitous
variation and the action of selection on its results. But we must remem-
ber that this is still only a working hypothesis.

J. B. S. Hatpanr: What Does Darwinism Amount to?
The Saturday Review, Jan. 3, 10, 1925.

BATESONIAN

The many converging lines of evidence point so clearly to the central
fact of the origin of the forms of life by an evolutionary process that
we are compelled to accept this deduction, but as to almost all the
essential features, whether of cause or mode, by which specific diversity
has come to be what we perceive it to be, we have to confess an igno-
rance nearly total.

Wituiam Bateson: Problems of Genetics.

* The third of a series of addresses on the problem of the origin of species,
the first having been “The Origin of Species as Revealed by Vertebrate
Paleontology” and the second “The Origin of Species, II,” as presented to the
National Academy of Sciences.

26 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

HE opening of this superb Museum, named after its

original benefactor, George Peabody, inspired by the
monumental labors of Othniel Charles Marsh between 1851
and 1899, filled with Marsh’s unique collections, and dedicated
to the furtherance of research in vertebrate paleontology,
marks an epoch in the development of Vertebrate Paleontology
in America.

Led by Thomas Jefferson, at once naturalist and president
of the United States, the pioneers of this historic branch of
biology worked their way into the then far West of the Ohio
River. Beyond, across the Missouri and the Mississippi,
stretched the wonderland of the plains and mountains, await-
ing the founders of our science, Joseph Leidy (1823-1891),
Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), and Othniel Charles
Marsh (1831-1899). These three paleontologists entered the
broad geologic horizons exposed to the eye by millenniums of
aridity, far surpassing in richness and content any of the fossil
horizons which in the previous century had made Europe the
home of the science of paleontology, or the Siwaliks of southern
Asia as explored by the great Falconer, and only recently chal-
lenged in richness by the vast arid stretches of Mongolia, the
latest scene of American energy and enterprise in exploration.

Under the uniform environmental stimulus of our virgin
Rocky Mountain region nothing could be more divergent than
the methods and the life work of these truly great scientists:
Leidy of the German spirit, broad, deep, unassailable in point
of fact, the last naturalist to cover life from the protozoa to
man ; Cope of the Celtic spirit, eager, impetuous, hasty both in
observation and in generalization, a genius in classification,
natural philosopher of the school of Lamarck, voluminous
writer and pamphleteer ; Marsh of the English spirit, a limited
writer, deliberate and calculating like Leidy, energetic in dis-
covery and detection of the most significant point in a fossil,
glowing with enthusiasm for paleontology, lavish like Cope in
personal expenditure, soon surpassing both his rivals in world-
wide fame. Aided by Oscar Harger, Marsh was the first to

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 27

discover and connect up important missing links in the birds,
in the horses, and in many other chains of vertebrate life so
eagerly sought by Darwin and his great proponent Huxley.
While able and fruitful in establishing great lines of descent
and new groupings in classification Marsh concerned himself
little about philosophy or about the causes and factors of evo-
lution which so constantly occupied the mind of Cope. En-
dowed with Marsh’s talent for seeing and doing the most
important thing first, the Peabody Museum which we now
rededicate became the mecca for the evolutionists of Europe
and Yale University the most famous center of vertebrate pale-
ontology in the world.

Vertebrate paleontology, from 1847, the date of Leidy’s
first paper on “The Fossil Horse of America,” to 1897—1898,
the date of Cope’s “Syllabus of Lectures on the Vertebrata,”
through the very diversity of the genius of these three men
firmly established the truth of the Lamarck-Darwin theory of
evolution. Thus between 1859, the date of “The Origin of
Species,” and 1897, the date of Cope’s last work, evolution was
firmly grounded as a Law of living Nature, and took its place
permanently beside the Law of Gravitation of Newton!

In view of the widespread reluctance in America to accept
Evolution as a Law and the tendency to continue to treat it
only as a theory, let us cite Baldwin’s definition of “law”:

LAW [Lat. lex, Ger. Gesetz, Fr. loi, Ital. legge |: Any formula-
tion of sequences which from demonstration, experimental proof,
successful application, or for any other reason, is accepted as
having the highest degree of probability. . . . Law is commonly
compared with Hypotruesis and THrory just in this, that these
latter terms carry less than the highest probability, and are still
in waiting for the demonstration, crucial testing, or final observa-
tion which, by conferring what amounts to certainty, raises them
to the dignity of law.

Not only the Law but many of the subsidiary Principles of
Evolution, which from the time of Aristotle (389-322 B.c.)

28 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

had been conceived and developed in human anatomy, in
zoology, and in comparative anatomy, became firmly estab-
lished through repeated verification in past and present time.
These subsidiary principles, five in number, prove to be uni-
versal not only in individual development and experience and
in racial evolution and progress but in the social and spiritual
life of man. Baldwin thus defines the word “‘principle” in its
bearing on science in general:

PRINCIPLE [Lat. principiwm, commencement, beginning;
trans. of Gr. 4px7, beginning, authority; Ger. Princip; Fr. prin-
cipe; Ital. principio.] Scientifically, it is the law through which
a diversity of facts, otherwise unrelated and unexplained, are
classified and interpreted: opposed to datum, brute fact, or “‘mere”
fact. . . . Greek philosophy began with the search after the
principle in the literal sense: that original reality (a) from which
other things are derived, and (b) out of which they consist. In
the sense (a) it was implicitly or explicitly dynamic, a force, a
causal power; in the sense (b) it was static, an element of sub-
sistence. The first meaning led up to Aristotle’s form «ides as a
principle; the second to his matter tAy.

Briefly, these subsidiary principles discovered and formu-
lated in zoology as confirmed and amplified in paleontology are
five in number: First, the principle of individual adaptation
or reaction to changes of motion or function which invariably
precede changes of form, as first observed by Aristotle and
finally confirmed by the experimental observations of Arbuth-
not Lane and Felix Regnault; second, the principle of develop-
ment through use, of degeneration through disuse, of balance
through unchanged or static function, understood and ex-
pressed by Goethe in the year 1784 when as a brilliant noviti-
ate in human and comparative anatomy he was on the very
threshold of evolution:

Thus by the animal’s form is its manner of living determined ;
Likewise the manner of life affecteth every creature,
Moulding its form.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 29

Third, the principle of acceleration or the hurrying forward
of characters in development and in evolution, and of retarda-
tion or the slowing down of characters, according to juvenile
or adult needs in the struggle for existence; fourth, the prin-
ciple of individual and racial struggle for existence and, indi-
vidual and racial survival of the fittest; fifth, the Lamarck-
Darwin principle of ébranchement, of divergence, the adaptive
radiation of Osborn, permeates the diversity of the plant and
animal world.

These five great principles, all alike discovered in zoology,
were confirmed and ratified in paleontology as the principles
of progression and of retrogression, manifested first only in
the individual and finally in the race. They are the coefficients
both of development and of evolution or phylogeny, as set
forth in what Osborn has termed the principle of tetraplasy
and the theory of tetrakinesis.

COEFFICIENT. (a) Coéperating ; acting in union to the same
end. (n) That which unites in action with something else to pro-
duce a given effect ; that which unites its action with the action of
another.

But these coefficients are not all the process, for in the nine-
teenth century the paleontologist found new fields to conquer
wholly beyond the vision of the zoologist; down through the
ages he alone became the camarade intime of evolution, of
the secular forward and backward marching hosts of sepa-
rate characters, and the new problem presented itself as to
how these separate characters arise and conduct themselves.
Whereas to the zoologist every minute mechanical part of
every animal is still and dead, to the paleontologist every
minute part is alive and moving, slowly unfolding in the origi-
nal sense of the Latin evolvere (evolutio), just as to the vision
of the embryologist individual development is an wnfolding of
the potency of the germ.

Thus the paleontologist discovers two entirely new princi-

30 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

ples, a sixth and a seventh, namely: Sixth, the principle of
continuity, of continuous and unbroken advance or recession
of each character from invisibility into visibility, and, seventh,
closely connected therewith, the principle of rectigradation,
of the rise continuously of each new organ out of heredity,
passing through stages of increasing mechanical perfection,
then perhaps gradually subsiding again into the germ plasm
until it finally disappears.

These seven* principles which govern the origin of species in
mechanical adaptation also concern genetics, for only through
paleontology can we clarify our genetical vision of heredity
and distinguish the ripples of ‘“‘saltation” or “mutation” from
the waves of “evolution,” the local currents and vortices of
“variation” from the rise and fall of the tide of great charac-
ters. The minute fossilized tissues of the ivory tusks of the mas-
todon and the stupendous “thunder-saurian” Brontosaurus
displayed in this Museum are alike mirrors and “‘phenotypes”
of the evolving germ plasm out of which they once developed.
The stages in the evolution of the horse, camel, mastodon, and
elephant, in the largest and in the minutest detail, are mirrors
of the evolution of the germ plasm. If your intellectual tastes
incline you to observe the energy of mechanisms within the
range of mechanical vision, seek them with Morgan in Droso-
phila, the fruit fly; if your intellectual predispositions incline
you to gaze into paleocrystic mirrors of energy and form,
observe the details of ascent from Eohippus to Equus, of the
rise of the Pleistocene mastodon of our forests from the Palao-
mastodon of Oligocene Africa, or the rise of Marsh’s giant
Triceratops from the egg-laying Protoceratops of the Desert
of Gobi. Whether geneticist or paleontologist, you are observ-
ing the initial and the terminal phases of the continuous crea-
tive evolution and adaptation of the germ plasm, for pale-

* This is a concise restatement of Principles I-IX elaborated in “The Origin
of Species as Revealed by Vertebrate Paleontology,” the author’s first address
on this subject.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 31

ontology forces upon us this new creational definition and
conception, namely, of the continwous creation and unfolding
of life fitted to a continuously changing world.

Is it not remarkable that neither through philosophy nor
through speculation but through paleontologic research the
original Latin word “evolution” becomes inadequate and the
old Sanskrit word \ kar reasserts itself?

CREATE [Lat. creatus, make, create, akin to Gr. kpaivew, com-
plete, Skt. V kar, make]. 1. trans. To bring into being; cause to
exist. 2. intrans. To originate ; engage in originative action.

Bergson’s term “creative evolution” comes nearer expressing
the actual truth of the bio-mechanical aspects of evolution ob-
served throughout a half century but contains teleologic or
vitalistic implications which we do not accept. This new defini-
tion is made not to please the still surviving “special creation-
ists” but to express the two new principles of evolution dis-
covered in paleontology, namely, the principle of continuity
and the principle of rectigradation—the one a denial of muta-
tion in bio-mechanical evolution, the other a denial of fortuity
in adaptation.

Before further clarifying these seven zoo-paleontological
principles let us glance at the historic explanations of evolu-
tion, as old as philosophic Greek thought; they are all summed
up in the great names of Buffon, of Lamarck, and of Darwin,
who were the first to formulate these historic explanations.
Lamarck and Darwin found themselves in an intellectual world
very hostile to evolutionism; they were alike too eager to ex-
plain; they could not put forth the infant evolution theory
without an explanation which would be accepted as in some
degree adequate to offset the contemporary creationism; they
both were very reliant on what we now know to be only partial
explanations.

The essence of the rival Lamarckian and Darwinian theories
can be distilled into modern economic phraseology: let us

32 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

imagine the germ plasm as our life-capital. In Lamarck’s
words,

tout ce qui a été acquis, tracé ou changé dans l’organisation des
individus, pendant le cours de leur vie, est conservé par la généra-
tion et transmis aux nouveaux individus qui proviennent de ceux
qui ont éprouvé ces changements [italics our own].

Lamarckism, in economic terms, treats the germ plasm as our
life-capital constantly enriched through the inheritance of
acquired adaptations.

As expressed by Darwin,

any minute variation in structure, habits, or instincts, adapting
that individual better to the new conditions, would tell upon its
vigour and health. . . . Those of the offspring who inherited the
variation would have a better chance of surviving [italics our
own |.

The germinal capital of Darwin varies in each individual, and
only the variation which best suits the environment is added to
the capital of the survivor.

As popularly worded here, these theories, usually regarded
as contradictory, are really complementary; they codperate,
they do not conflict, they are not the whole explanation but
only a fraction of the explanation of animal and human prog-
ress in evolution. Yet overconfident post-Darwin seekers after
explanations and causes came in great waves of opinion and
founded schools of followers. Darwin and Wallace strongly
condemned Lamarck and presented Natural Selection so force-
fully that it held full sway from 1859 to 1870; then Lamarck-
ism was revived in the minds of Spencer, Cope, and even of
Darwin himself, until in 1880 Weismann gave Lamarckism in
its original form a coup de grace and revived Darwinism in its
purest original form. In 1890 Darwinism found a new cham-
pion in DeVries and Natural Selection appeared under a new
name as the “mutation theory”; from 1890 to 1924 this muta-

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 33

tion theory enjoyed the following of a great school of muta-
tionists and, in turn, the new support of Genetics, until Bate-
son, founder of the genetic school, declared that we knew
neither the cause nor the mode of the origin of species, and
crushed the hopes of mutationists as well as of geneticists to
give an acceptable answer to the age-old problem of the origin
of species.

DISCOVERIES OF PALEONTOLOGY

Meanwhile some few paleontologists were speculating but
others were quietly devoting themselves to gathering harvest
after harvest of facts about the modes and causes of the origin
of species, and made a series of discoveries.

First, all the principles of Phylogeny, or the actual lines of
animal descent, which had been sought in vain by zoology and
comparative anatomy, were discovered by intensive research
into the details of change in one family of mammals after
another. Thus in Europe Déperet and Stehlin were ferreting
out “ascending and descending mutations” in the sense of
Waagen, and in America we were microscoping the four-mil-
lion-year ancestry of the horses, the rhinoceroses, the titano-
theres, and the proboscideans, which had been broadly sketched
in the telescopic restorations of Leidy, Cope, and Marsh. There
was revealed a minuteness of realistic detail which is soon to be
amplified by the still-sought Tertiary ancestry of man, of
which we know the branches and the twigs but not the main
trunk.

Second, as a unique result of paleontological research we
perceive evolution as a secular phenomenon, a process of the
ages which, measured either by geology or by the radium con-
tent of the rocks, is infinitely longer than either Lamarck or
Darwin conceived; as a cause of secular evolution Lamarckism
in large part holds true, just as Darwinism as a cause of secu-
lar evolution universally holds true, although, as we shall show,
paleontology denies absolutely the origin of species according
to the original conceptions and literal interpretations of either

34 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Lamarck or Darwin. In claiming that all that is acquired is
transmitted Lamarck was overconfident, as Darwin was over-
confident in claiming that every variation, however slight,
favors the chance of survival.

Third, the grand result of paleontological research was to
transfer from the field of imagination, reason, and speculation
to the field of direct observation the whole question of the
modes and methods of evolution and the whole problem of the
manner in which new specific adaptations originate and of the
details by which new bio-mechanical species are constantly
created. I refer to such classic bio-mechanical adaptation as
the elongated neck of the giraffe. In this and many other illus-
trations it appears that “species” and “tadaptations” are prac-
tically synonymous terms, as may be clearly seen in the follow-
ing brief history of these two terms.

The origin of Species and the origin of Adaptation have
practically the same significance, for every species is an en-
semble of countless adaptations in various stages of rise and
decline. What Aristotle in 300 z.c. called an Adaptation, Lin-
neus in 1758 called a Species. When Aristotle in his History
of Animals and in his Physics debated the natural causes of
adaptations he had in mind the same structures and functions
as those which Linneus used in defining his species. For exam-
ple, the celebrated passage in Aristotle’s Physics:

What, then, hinders but that the parts in Nature may also thus
arise? For instance, that the teeth should arise from necessity,
the front teeth sharp and adapted to divide the food, the grinders
broad and adapted to breaking the food into pieces. . . . It is
argued that where all things happened as if they were made for
some purpose, being aptly united by chance, these were preserved,
but such as were not aptly made, these were lost and still perish,
according to what Empedocles says concerning the bull species
with human heads. . . . Nature produces those things which,
being continually moved by a certain principle contained in them-
selves, arrive at a certain end.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 35

For example, again, Linneus (1758) defines the anthropoid
ape known as the orang:

SIMIA: Dentes Primores IV, approximati.
Laniarii folitari, longiores hine remoti.
Molares obtufi.
Cauda nulla: Simi veterum.

In our natural tendency to follow the line of least resistance,
namely, to seek explanations and causes before facts, may we
not guard the advice of Pliny as quoted by Fourtau:

Pline l’a dit, et on ne saurait trop le répéter; il convient d’abord
de bien experimer ce qui est, avant de remonter aux causes: Que-
rere tu causas, mihi abunde est si expressi quod efficitur. Je m’esti-
merais trés heureux, si, dans ce travail, j’ai réalisé le sage pré-
cepte du naturaliste romain.

THEORIES OF CAUSATION

To resume the matter of explanation and interpretation,
from the very dawn of human ambition to observe and interpret
nature there have been only two broad philosophical solutions
of the problem of adaptation and of the origin of species: the
supernatural and the natural. Aristotle adopted the natural
and fully debated the essential idea of both Darwinism and
Lamarckism; to the latter Brooks (1899) has called our atten-
tion:

Herbert Spencer tells us that the segmentation of the backbone
is the inherited effect of fractures, caused by bending, but Aris-
totle has shown (“Parts of Animals,” I. i.) that Empedocles and
the ancient writers err in teaching that the bendings to which the
backbone has been subjected are the cause of its joints, since the
thing to be accounted for is not the presence of joints, but the
fitness of the joints for the needs of their possessor [italics our
own |.

36 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Since 1859 there have been a host of overworked explana-
tions and hypotheses ; the word “‘variation” of Darwin has been
a will-o’-the-wisp leading biologists into many morasses, with
its many modern mutant terms, “variation,” “selection,” “‘mu-
tation.”

Paleontology enables us to winnow out the wheat from
the chaff in all these partial explanations of the origin of
species, for it demonstrates that hosts of variations such as
those set forth by Bateson in the year 1894 in his ‘Materials
for the Study of Variation” are wholly insignificant in the
evolution process.

Paleontology also throws its critical light on the relative
value of the three historic explanations as to the causes of
adaptation, namely, those of Buffon, of Lamarck, and of Dar-
win, which alike turn on the question of inheritance or trans-
mission of individual adaptation.

First, inasmuch as marvels of origin are due to individual
adaptation, which may by inheritance furnish the key to evolu-
tion, the idea running through the minds of Aristotle, La-
marck, Spencer, and Cope is shown by paleontology to be illu-
sory, for individual adaptation now proves to be a secular
rather than immediate cause of the origin of species as La-
marck suggests. Even if we were to demonstrate the immediate,
prompt, and entire inheritance imagined by Lamarck, the
majority of new bio-mechanical adaptations would still remain
wholly unaccounted for.

Second, there is the historic idea of Buffon as to the inherit-
ance of the direct action of new environment; it is true that
new species, as observed by systematists, suddenly or gradually
originate in this way, as shown by Crampton in Partula, be-
cause in the laboratories of Nature the new environment en-
dures. A host of field naturalists have long since proved
Buffon’s principle to be nearly universal among birds and
mammals. Another host of experimentalists in America, Eng-
land, and Germany are demonstrating the immediate origin of
new species in Le Monde Ambient of chemical and physical

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859-1925 37

experiment. So far as we see at present, such origin of the
species of systematists is chiefly in bio-chemical adaptations in
which the germ may be affected permanently by a molecular
or atomic saltation. On the contrary, from the secular point
of view of paleontology, the germ plasm or keimplasma of
Weismann is at once the most stable and the most plastic ele-
ment in life; it offers stubborn resistance to both Lamarckian
and Buffonian influences, such as we observe day by day in
nature and in the laboratory.

But paleontology proves that in the long run of geologic
time both Buffon and Lamarck were right in their main con-
ceptions: organs starved by unfriendly environment finally dis-
appear; organs which do not pay their way and are starved
by disuse slowly drop out of the germ plasm; vitally essential
organs are absolutely stable. Why not therefore concede the
truth of the great conceptions of Buffon and Lamarck, even if
immediate inheritance by the germ is disproved in the great
majority of cases? Why not concede the still greater concep-
tion of Darwin, misled as he was as to time by the marvelously
rapid evolution of the germ plasm witnessed in artificial selec-
tion? Whereas neo-Darwinians have been as impatient as neo-
Lamarckians in looking for instantaneous results in the first
or the few following generations, paleontology proves that the
deferred secular action of Natural Selection is as firmly estab-
lished as the deferred secular action of both Buffon and La-
marck factors. Both in progressive and retrogressive organs
paleontology proves that every organ needs the sustaining and
standardizing power of Selection as it acts to-day in swarms
of a trillion mosquitos, in herds of a million bison, in flocks
of a thousand ducks.

But if we grant that Buffonian, Lamarckian, and Darwinian
factors were all true even in this secular sense, if we grant that
the living and the lifeless environment, the adaptation, habit,
and survival-of-the-fittest variations combine continuously to
produce new adaptations and species, do we then account for
all the structures we paleontologists observe in the modes of

38 PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY -

origin of species in ascending and descending phyla of all the
animals we have been able to study?

We answer, “Certainly not.”

Buffonism, Lamarckism, and Darwinism combined account
for only a small fraction of what we observe. The unaccounted
residue of creative evolution is by far the larger—is, in fact,
infinitely the larger—part. Here is the critical point in modern
biology where we pass from the rational, 1.e., all that is within
the range of observation, experience, and reason, to the super-
rational, namely, to the ultimate unknown causes of what
Lucretius called “the firm and undeviating order,” quoting his
master Aristotle as set forth in his refutation of Democritean
fortuity in nature:

Order and a firm and certain constitution or being are far more
obvious in celestial natures than in us, but an uncertain, incon-
stant, and fortuitous condition is rather the property of the
mortal race.

This discovery of the firm and undeviating order with which
paleontology replaces all the chance explanations of adapta-
tion from Empedocles to Darwin is the supreme service which
paleontologic research renders to biology.

Are we right in concluding with Balzac in his brilliant éloge
to Cuvier that paleontology comes very close to philosophy,
the science of the causes and origins of things? Was the author
of La Peau de Chagrin right in his prophetic vision of the then
infant science, the paléontologie named by Cuvier?

Il réveille le néant sans prononcer des paroles artificiellement
magiques; il fouille une parcelle de gypse, y apergoit une em-
preinte, et vous crie: “Voyez!”? Soudain les marbres s’animalisent,
la mort se vivifie, le monde se déroule! Aprés d’innombrables
dynasties de créatures gigantesques, aprés des races de poissons
et des clans de mollusques, arrive enfin le genre humain, produit
degénéré d’un type grandiose, brisé peut-étre par le Créateur.

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Additional Copies
of this Bulletin may be procured from
Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University,
New Haven, Conn.,
at
25 cents per copy.

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