cuvier's work in paleontology. 57 



very far from paying any regard to these correct assertions 

 of a simple and healthy human understanding; it was 

 not till the end of the last century that it was generally 

 accepted, in consequence of the foundation of the Neptunian 

 geology by Werner. 



The foundation of a more strictly scientific palaeontology, 

 however, belongs to the beginning of our century, when 

 Cuvier published his classic researches on petrified Verte- 

 brate animals, and when his great opponent, Lamarck, made 

 known his remarkable investigations on fossil Invertebrate 

 animals, especially on petrified snails and clams. In Cuvier's 

 celebrated work "On the Fossil Bones" of Vertebrate animals 

 — principally of mammals and reptiles — we see that he had 

 already arrived at the knowledge of some very important 

 and general paleeontological laws, which are of great con- 

 sequence to the history of creation. Foremost among them 

 stands the assertion that the extinct species of animals, 

 whose remains we find petrified in the difierent strata of 

 the earth's crust, lying one above another, difier all the 

 more strikingly from the still living kindred species 

 of animals the deeper those strata lie — in other words, the 

 earlier the animals lived in past ages. In fact, in every per- 

 pendicular section of the stratified crust of the earth we 

 find that the difierent strata, deposited by the water in a 

 certain historical succession, are characterized by different 

 petrifactions, and that these extinct organisms become more 

 like those of the present day the higher the strata lie ; in 

 other words, the more recent the period in the earth's 

 history in which they lived, died, and became encrusted by 

 the deposited and hardened strata of mud. 



However important this general observation of Cuvier's 



