Note 1075 — Chapter VII

Hence he is called by Mr. Owen, ‘the founder of palæontological science.’ Owen on Fossil Mammalia, in Report of Brit. Assoc. for 1843, p. 208. It was in 1796 that there were thus ‘opened to him entirely new views of the theory of the earth.’ p. 209. See also Bakewell's Geology, p. 368; and Milne Edwards, Zoologie, part ii. p. 279. The importance of this step is becoming more evident every year; and it has been justly remarked, that without palæontology there would be, properly speaking, no geology. Balfour's Botany, 1849, p. 591. Sir R. Murchison (Siluria, 1854, p. 366) says, ‘it is essentially the study of organic remains which has led to the clear subdivision of the vast mass of older rocks, which were there formerly merged under the unmeaning term “Grauwacke.”’ In the same able work, p. 465, we are told that, ‘in surveying the whole series of formations, the practical geologist is fully impressed with the conviction that there has, at all periods, subsisted a very intimate connexion between the existence, or, at all events, the preservation of animals, and the media in which they have been fossilized.’ For an instance of this in the old red sandstone, see p. 329.