518 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY. 



molar teeth, I no longer doubted that the fossil elephants were of a 

 species different from the Indian elephant. This idea, which I an- 

 nounced to the Institute in the month of January, 1796, opened tome 

 views entirely new respecting the theory of the earth ; and determined 

 me to devote myself to the long researches and to the assiduous 

 labors which have now occupied me for twenty-five years."" 



We have here, then, the starting-point of those researches concern- 

 ing extinct animals, which, ever since that time, have attracted so large 

 a share of notice from geologists and from the world. Cuvier coulc 1 

 hardly have anticipated the vast storehouse of materials which lay 

 under his feet, ready to supply him occupation of the most intense 

 interest in the career on which he had thus entered. The examination 

 of the strata on which Paris stands, and of which its buildings consist, 

 supplied him with animals, not only different from existing ones, but 

 some of them of great size and curious peculiarities. A careful exami- 

 nation of the remains which these strata contain was undertaken soon 

 after the period we have referred to. In 1802, Defrance had collected 

 several hundreds of undescribed species of shells ; and Lamarck 28 began 

 a series of Memoirs upon them ; remodelling the whole of Conchology, 

 in order that they might be included in its classifications. And two 

 years afterwards (1804) appears the first of Cuvier's grand series of 

 Memoirs containing the restoration of the vertebrate animals of these 

 strata. In this vast natural museum, and in contributions from other 

 parts of the globe, he discovered the most extraordinary creatures : 

 the Palseotherium, 29 which is intermediate between the horse and the 

 pig ; the Anoplotherium, which stands nearest to the rhinoceros and 

 the tapir ; the Megalonix and Megatherium, animals of the sloth tribe, 

 but of the size of the ox and the rhinoceros. The Memoirs which 

 contained these and many other discoveries, set the naturalists to work 

 in every part of Europe. 



Another very curious class of animals was brought to light princi 

 pally by the geologists of England; animals of which the bones, found 

 in the lias stratum, were at first supposed to be those of crocodiles. 

 But in 1816, 30 Sir Everard Home says, "In truth, on a consideration 

 of this skeleton, we cannot but be inclined to believe, that among the 

 inimals destroyed by the catastrophes of remote antiquity, there had 



27 Ossemcns Fossiles second edit. i. 178. 



28 Annalcs du Museum d'Hist. Nat. torn. i. p. 308, and the following volumes. 

 39 Daubuisson, ii. 411. 30 Phil. Trans. 1816, p. 20. 



