Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Evolution (Biology)
Now, how many of those are absolutely extinct? That is to say, how many of
these orders of animals have lived at a former period of the world's
history but have at present no representatives? That is the sense in which
I meant to use the word "extinct." I mean that those animals did live on
this earth at one time, but have left no one of their kind with us at the
present moment. So that estimating the number of extinct animals is a sort
of way of comparing the past creation as a whole with the present as a
whole. Among the mammalia and birds there are none extinct; but when we
come to the reptiles there is a most wonderful thing: out of the eight
orders, or thereabouts, which you can make among reptiles, one-half are
extinct. These diagrams of the plesiosaurus, the ichthyosaurus, the
pterodactyle, give you a notion of some of these extinct reptiles. And here
is a cast of the pterodactyle and bones of the ichthyosaurus and the
plesiosaurus, just as fresh-looking as if it had been recently dug up in a
churchyard. Thus, in the reptile class, there are no less than half of the
orders which are absolutely extinct. If we turn to the _Amphibia_,
there was one extinct order, the Labyrinthodonts, typified by the large
salamander-like beast shown in this diagram.
No order of fishes is known to be extinct. Every fish that we find in the
strata--to which I have been referring--can be identified and placed in one
of the orders which exist at the present day. There is not known to be a
single ordinal form of insect extinct. There are only two orders extinct
among the _Crustacea_. There is not known to be an extinct order of
these creatures, the parasitic and other worms; but there are two, not to
say three, absolutely extinct orders of this class, the
_Echinodermata_; out of all the orders of the _Coelenterata_ and
_Protozoa_ only one, the Rugose Corals.
So that, you see, out of somewhere about 120 orders of animals, taking them
altogether, you will not, at the outside estimate, find above ten or a
dozen extinct. Summing up all the order of animals which have left remains
behind them, you will not find above ten or a dozen which cannot be
arranged with those of the present day; that is to say, that the difference
does not amount to much more than ten per cent.: and the proportion of
extinct orders of plants is still smaller. I think that that is a very
astounding a most astonishing fact: seeing the enormous epochs of time
which have elapsed during the constitution of the surface of the earth as
it at present exists, it is, indeed, a most astounding thing that the
proportion of extinct ordinal types should be so exceedingly small.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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