SYSTEMATIC DESCRIPTIVE GEOLOGY. 517 



appealed to by geologists, ever since Cuvier published his examination 

 of the fossil inhabitants of the Paris basin. Without attempting a histo- 

 ry of such labors, I may notice a few circumstances connected with them. 



Sect. 4. Advances in Paleontology. Cuvier. 



So long as the organic fossils which were found in the strata of the 

 earth were the remains of marine animals, it was very difficult for 

 geologists to be assured that the animals were such as did not exist in 

 any part or clime of the existing ocean. But when large land and 

 river animals were discovered, different from any known species, the 

 persuasion that they were of extinct races was forced upon the natu- 

 ralist. Yet this opinion was not taken up slightly, nor acquiesced in 

 without many struggles. 



Bones supposed to belong to fossil elephants, were some of the first 

 with reo-ard to which this conclusion was established. Such remains 



O 



occur in vast numbers in the soil and gravel of almost every part of 

 the world ; especially in Siberia, where they are called the bones of 

 the 'mammoth. They had been noticed by the ancients, as we learn 

 from Pliny ; a * and had been ascribed to human giants, to elephants 

 imported by the Romans, and to many other origins. But in 1796, 

 Cuvier had examined these opinions with a more profound knowledge 

 than his predecessors ; and he thus stated the result of his researches. 2 ' 

 " With regard to what have been called the fossil remains of elephants, 

 from. Tentzelius to Pallas, I believe that I am in the condition to 

 prove, that they belong to animals which were very clearly different 

 in species from our existing elephants, although they resembled them 

 sufficiently to be considered as belonging to the same genera." He had 

 founded this conclusion principally on the structure of the teeth, which 

 he found to differ in the Asiatic and African elephant ; while, in the 

 fossil animal, it was different from both. But he also reasoned in part 

 on the form of -the skull, of which the best-known example had been 

 described in the Philosophical Transactions as early as 1737. 28 " As 

 soon," says Cuvier, at a later period, " as I became acquainted with 

 Messerschmidt's drawing, and joined to the differences which it pre- 

 sented, those which I had myself observed in the inferior jaw and the 



24 Hist. Nat. lib. xxxvi. 18. K Him. Inst. Math, et Phys. torn. ii. p. 4. 



28 Described by Breyne from a specimen found in Liberia by Messerschmidt 

 in 1722. Phil. "Trans, xl. 4-16. 



