THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3543, 28 September 1926, Page 4

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

The .contrast between the knowledge available when Darwin formulated his theory of the origin of species and! that of the present day was emphasised in an address before the section of zoology of the British Association by Professor H. F. Osborn, who; is the leading living palaeontologist, and the president of the American Museum of Natural History. The number of species of mammals known in 1827 was 1124, whereas 13,450 species and sub-species were known to-day. Knowledge of other vertebrate groups had increased in similar or larger proportions, and knowledge of fossil forms had increased out of all proportion. In Darwin’s time species stood apart like mountain peaks, whereas to-day they are known to be connected by intermediates and intergradations in very many casos. It was the more a testimony to the boldness and valid-

ity of Darwin’s intellectual grasp that he should have disputed the fixity of species and insisted on their origin by a process of evolution. Professor Osborn said we now understand the modes by which new species and sub-species originated; they were continuous, determinate, and, on the whole, adaptive. Species-in-the-making, or to hse the technical term, the process of sepciation, had been independently discovered among fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Specialisation was an excessively slow process; 40,000 years, the lapse of time since the just glaciation, was a moderate estimate of the time that had been required to produce the new species and sub-species of whose origin we had evidence. But palaeontology showed that, speeiation had been going on among animals and plants for 1,000,000,000 years. But our enhanced knowledge made the problem of the causes of the origin of species' infinitely more difficult even than it had appeared tq Darwin.