quite inapplicable to this group; since even if the limits of such assemblages were extended so as to include what would elsewhere be accounted genera, they would still be found so intimately connected by gradational links, that definite lines of demarcation could not be drawn between them.
III. The only natural classification of the vast aggregate of diversified forms which this group contains, will be one which ranges them according to their mode and degree of divergence from a small number of principal family types; and any subordinate groupings of genera and species which may be adopted for the convenience of description and nomenclature, must be regarded merely as assemblages characterized by the nature and degree of the modifications of the original type which they may have respectively acquired in the course of genetic descent from a common ancestry.
IV. Even in regard to these family types, it may be fairly questioned whether analogical evidence does not rather favour the idea of their derivation from a common original, than that of their primitive distinctness.
V. The evidence in regard to the genetic continuity of the Foraminifera of successive geological periods and of those of the later of these and the existing inhabitants of our seas, is as complete as the nature of the case admits.
VI. There is no evidence of any fundamental modification or advance in the Foraminiferous type from the Palæozoic period to the present time. The most marked transition appears to have taken place between the Cretaceous period, whose Foraminiferous Fauna seems to have been chiefly composed of smaller and simpler types, and the commencement of the Tertiary, of which one of the earliest members was the Nummulitic limestone, which forms a stratum of enormous thickness, that ranges over wide areas in Europe, Asia, and America, and is chiefly composed of the largest and most specialized forms of the entire group. But these were not unrepresented in previous epochs; and their extraordinary development may have been simply due to the prevalence of conditions that specially favoured it. The Foraminiferous Fauna of our own seas probably presents a greater range of variety than existed at any preceding period; but there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type.
VII. The general principles thus educed from the study of the Foraminifera should be followed in the investigation of the systematic affinities of each of those great types of animal and vegetable form, which is marked out by its physiological distinctness from the rest. In every one of these there is ample evidence of variability; and the limits of that variability have to be determined by a far more extended comparison than has been usually thought necessary, before the real relations of their different forms can be even approximately determined.
VIII. As it is the aim of the physical philosopher to determine
