Certainly
not fewer than thirty or forty thousand different species of fossils
have been discovered. You have no more ground for doubting that these
creatures really lived and died at or near the places in which we find
them than you have for like scepticism about a shell on the sea-shore.
The evidence is as good in the one case as in the other.
Our next business is to look at the general character of these fossil
remains, and it is a subject which it will be requisite to consider
carefully; and the first point for us is to examine how much the
extinct 'Flora' and 'Fauna' as a 'whole'--disregarding altogether the
'succession' of their constituents, of which I shall speak
afterwards--differ from the 'Flora' and 'Fauna' of the present
day;--how far they differ in what we 'do' know about them, leaving
altogether out of consideration speculations based upon what we 'do
not' know.
I strongly imagine that if it were not for the peculiar appearance that
fossilised animals have, any of you might readily walk through a museum
which contains fossil remains mixed up with those of the present forms
of life, and I doubt very much whether your uninstructed eyes would
lead you to see any vast or wonderful difference between the two. If
you looked closely, you would notice, in the first place, a great many
things very like animals with which you are acquainted now: you would
see differences of shape and proportion, but on the whole a close
similarity.
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