William Berryman Scott

"Only two or three years ago an expedition from the discovered a place in Wyoming where the lie directly upon those of the , thus fully confirming the inference as to the relative age of the two s which had long ago been drawn from the comparative study of their fossil mammals. The palæontological method of determining the geological date of the stratified rocks is thus an indispensable means of correlating the scattered exposures of the strata in widely separated regions and in different continents, it may be with thousands of miles of intervening ocean. The general principle employed is that close similarity of fossils in the rocks of the regions compared points to an approximately contemporaneous date of formation of those rocks. The principal must not, however, be applied in an offhand or uncritical manner, or it will lead to serious error."

"The day has gone forever gone by when any one mind, however profound and comprehensive, can take all knowledge for its province. Increase of knowledge, like advance of civilization, necessarily brings with it a division of labor, and each of the great branches of science becomes more and more minutely divided and subdivided for the purposes of investigation. Such subdivision greatly enhances the efficiency of the individual worker, enabling him to concentrate his attention upon some problem of more or less limited scope, and, so far, it is advantageous. On the other hand, like most human devices, it has its drawbacks, and what is gained in one direction is apt to be lost in another. One great and growing evil is the subdiviision of knowledge which accompanies specialization of research."

"suffers from the drawback that it cannot with certainty distinguish between resemblances due to genetic affinity, on the other hand, and those which are the results of convergence or parallelism, on the other, and it possesses no trustworthy criterion, by which it can test the taxonomic significance of structural characters."

"Among Scotts outstanding contributions to the study of evolution were two memoirs, both published in 1891, the first on and the second on and . Besides the descriptive parts of these papers, the first included a list of what Scott considered the most important questions regarding evolution and the second attempted to answer these questions from the paleontological point of view."