Palaeontologist Synonyms

The public buildings include the town hall, a fine and commodious house on the site of the old tolbooth; the Falconer museum, containing among other exhibits several valuable fossils, and named after Dr Hugh Falconer (1808-1865), the distinguished palaeontologist and botanist, a native of the town; the mechanics' institute; the agricultural and market hall; Leanchoil hospital and Anderson's Institution for poor boys.

This line of hypothesis and demonstration is typical of the palaeogeographic methods generally - namely, that vertebrate palaeontologists, impressed by the sudden appearance of extinct forms of continental life, demand land connexion or migration tracts from common centres of origin and dispersal, while the invertebrate palaeontologist alone is able to restore ancient coast-lines and determine the extent and width of these tracts.

Melchior Neumayr, the great Austrian palaeontologist, especially extended the philosophic foundations of modern invertebrate palaeontology, and traced a number of continuous genetic series (formenreihe) in successive horizons.

The task of the palaeontologist thus begins with the appearance of life on the globe, and ends in close relation to the studies of the archaeologist and historian as well as of the zoologist and botanist.

The consequences of this principle when applied to the adaptations of animals bring us to the very antithesis of Cuvier's supposed "law of correlation," for we find that, while the end results of adaptation are such that all parts of an animal conspire to make the whole adaptive, there is no fixed correlation either in the form or rate of development of parts, and that it is therefore impossible for the palaeontologist to predict the anatomy of an unknown animal from one of its parts only, unless the animal happens to belong to a type generally familiar.