S28 M. Arago''s Historical Eloge of Joseph Fourier. 



The study of fossil animals is not less important. I should 

 be digressing from my subject, were I here to examine how 

 animal organization was developed on the earth, and what mo- 

 difications, or rather what complications it experienced after each 

 cataclysm ; or even if I should pause to describe one of those 

 ancient epochs, during which the earth, the sea, and the atmo- 

 sphere had only as inhabitants, cold-blooded reptiles of enor- 

 mous dimensions; turtles with shells ten feet in diameter; 

 lizards fifty-five feet long; pterodactyles^ true flying dragons, 

 of such singular shapes, that they have been placed, on well- 

 founded arguments, by turns among reptiles, mammalia, and 

 birds. The object I have in view, does not require such long 

 details, and one single remark will suffice. 



Among the bones contained in those formations which are 

 the nearest to the present surface of the globe, there are those 

 of the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. These 

 remains of animals peculiar to warm regions occur in all lati- 

 tudes. They have even been dicovered at Melville Island, 

 where the temperature falls at present to 50° below zero. In 

 Siberia, they are found in such abundance, that they have been 

 made an article of trade. Finally, on the steep shores which 

 border the Frozen Sea, vre no longer meet with mere fragments 

 of skeletons, but elephants quite entire, and still covered with 

 their flesh and skin. 



I should be much deceived, gentlemen, if each of you had 

 not deduced from these remarkable facts, an inference also very 

 remarkable, and for which the fossil flora had already pre- 

 pared us, viz. that the polar regions of our globe have ex- 

 perienced an excessive cooling. 



In explanation of this curious phenomenon, the cosmologists 

 do not assign any influence to possible variations in the inten- 

 sity of the sun ; and yet, the stars, those distant suns, do not pos- 

 sess that constancy of brightness which is commonly attributed 

 to them ; and some, in a pretty short time, have been reduced 

 to the hundredth part of their original intensity, whilst several 

 have totally disappeared. It has been thought preferable to 

 refer every thing to a heat proper to the earth or original, with 

 which the earth had been formerly furnished, and which had 

 been gradually dispersed. 



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