The organization of Trilobites, deduced from their living affinities. With a systematic review of the species hitherto described / By Hermann Burmeister ... Ed. from the German by Professor Bell ... and Professor E. Forbes.

  • Burmeister, Hermann, 1807-1892.
Date:
1846
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The organization of Trilobites, deduced from their living affinities. With a systematic review of the species hitherto described / By Hermann Burmeister ... Ed. from the German by Professor Bell ... and Professor E. Forbes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    collector to endeavour to diffuse Linnaeus’s views respecting the true affinity of the Trilobites among his readers, and to prove “ that the Conchologists have no longer any reason to consider the fossil which had hitherto been known by the name of a Conclntce trilobi rugosi as a part of their science.” The author of the treatise referred to, Ch. Fr. Wilkens, announced his name in the following year, and published his opinions under the title of c Information respecting Rare Animal Petrifactions.’ He treats of the numerous Trilobites in his collection with much cleverness, although with an unnecessary prolixity, and arrives finally at the well-founded result, that the name of JEntomolithus branchiopodis cancriformis marinus ought to be given to them. But the appearance of this treatise in an unknown periodical, was not calculated to attract attention, or procure credit and appreciation for it, and it is questionable whether it would ever have come to the knowledge of subsequent authors, if J. Imm. Walch had not particularly referred to it in his ‘ Natural History of Fossils.’ It decided Walch’s opinion, however, and as this diligent writer brought together everything that had hitherto been written on the Trilobites, his elaborate work became an authority on which succeeding authors might rely with certainty in the labyrinth of conflicting opinions. Being convinced of the unfitness of the names hitherto used, either owfing to their incorrectness or their length, he proposed a new designation for them, and was the first who called these animals Trilobites, a designation, which, with the exception of Dalman, has been retained by all the subsequent authors, and therefore, being the oldest and by no means an unsuitable name, will also be retained by us. Walch, however, was not sufficiently a practical zoologist to be able to support Wilkens’s views by additional reasons, and indeed he generally speaks more of the ideas of others than of his own opinions on the subject, and seems inclined to consider the Onisci as the animals most nearly allied to the Trilobites. Henceforth the opinion of the affinity of the Trilobites with the Mollusca was nearly buried in oblivion, and would probably never have been known, if its memory had not been revived again nearly fifty years afterwards by a zoologist, from whom, possessing as he did an accurate knowledge of the Articulata, one could least of all have expected it, namely, by Latreille. The next writer after Walch, John Beckmann, calls them Onisci, without any circumlocution, and Count v. Kinsky, in a letter to the Baron von Born, uses the name given by Linnaeus, while M. Th. Brunich, on the other hand, uses Trilobus, Walch’s designation in an abbreviated form, and J. K. Gehler retains it in its original form. Finally, the opinion of A. Modeer, who thought that he could recognize the structure of a tube beetle, (Coccinella) in the Trilobites, at least in the heads of Battus and Olenus, which he described, was new but erroneous. SECTION IV. Such was the state of our knowledge of the Trilobites, when the great political events which took place at the conclusion of the last and the commencement of the present century rendered all serious efforts for the advance of science impossible. During the period extending from 1793 to 1820, we only meet with three short observations on the Trilobites, of which the first is contained in Blumenbach’s ‘Illustrations of Natural History;’ the second in Parkinson’s ‘Organic Remains of a Former World;’ the third in Leonhard’s ‘ Taschen-buch fur Mineralogie ;’ in which the Baron v. Schlotheim describes a new series