FUNDAMENTAL RELATIONS OF ANIMALS 95 



to appreciate the wonderful skill, the high intellectual powers, the 

 vast erudition displayed in the investigations of Cuvier and his suc- 

 cessors upon the faunas and floras of past ages.^-- But I cannot re- 

 frain from expressing my wonder at the puerility of the discussions 

 in which some geologists allow themselves still to indulge, in the 

 face of such a vast amount of well digested facts as our science now 

 possesses. They have hardly yet learned to see that there exists a 

 definite order in the succession of these innumerable extinct beings; 

 and of the relations of this gradation to the other great features ex- 

 hibited by the animal kingdom, of the great fact that the develop- 

 ment of life is the prominent trait in the history of our globe, they 

 seem either to know nothing, or to look upon it only as a vague 

 speculation, plausible perhaps, but hardly deserving the notice of 

 sober science. 



It is true, Palaeontology as a science is very young; it has had to 

 fight its course through the unrelenting opposition of ignorance and 

 prejudice. What amount of labor and patience it has cost only to 

 establish the fact that fossils are really the remains of animals and 

 plants that once actually lived upon earth, only those know who are 

 familiar with the history of science. Then it had to be proved that 

 they are not the wrecks of the Mosaic deluge, which, for a time, was 

 the prevailing opinion, even among scientific men.^-^ After Cuvier 

 had shown, beyond question, that they are the remains of animals 

 no longer to be found upon earth among the living. Palaeontology 

 acquired for the first time a solid basis. Yet what an amount of labor 

 it has cost to ascertain, by direct evidence, how these remains are 

 distributed in the solid crust of our globe, what are the differences 



^^ Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles . . ■ ; James Sowerby, The Mineral 

 Conchology of Great Britain (6 vols., London, 1812-1819); E. F. von Schlottheim, Die 

 Petrafactenkunde . . . (Gotha, 1820), Lamarck, Memoires sur les fossiles des environs 

 de Paris (Paris, 1823); Georg A. Goldfuss, Petrafacta Germanice (9 pts., Diisseldorf, 

 1826-1833); Kaspar M. von Sternberg, Versuch einer geognostisch-botanischen Dar- 

 stellung der Flora der Vorwelt (8 pts., Leipzig and Prague, 1820-1838); Alexandre Brong- 

 niart, Prodrome d'une Histoire des Vegetaux fossiles (2 vols., Paris, 1818), and His- 

 toire des Vegetaux fossiles (2 vols., Paris, 1828-1843); John Lindley and William Hut- 

 ton, The Fossil Flora of Great Britain (3 vols., London, 1831-1837); H. R. Goppert, 

 Systema Filicum fossilium (Breslau and Bonn, 1836), Die Gattungen der fossilen Pfianzen 

 verglichen mit denen der Jetzwelt (6 pts., Bonn, 1841-1848), and Monographic der 

 fossilen Coniferen (Diisseldorf, 1850). 



^^Johann J. Scheuchzer, Homo Diluvii testis . . . (Zurich, 1726); Buckland, Rili- 

 quicE diluviancE, or Observations on the Organic Remains . . . attesting the Action of 

 an Universal Deluge (London, 1824); August Scilla, La vana speculaiione desingannata 

 del sense (Naples, 1670). 



