MEMOIR OF CUVIER. 129 



everywhere cover the remains of an earlier creatiuii, of a mined nature. On 

 tlie one hand immense masses of shells and of other marine bodies are found at 

 great distances from any sea, at heiiihts to which no sea could now attain, and 

 from thence have been derived th(? first facts in support of all those traditions of 

 deluges preserved among so many tribes of mankind. On the other hand, the 

 large bones discovered from time to time in the bowels of the earth, in the caverns 

 of the mountains, have given rise to tliose other popular traditions, not less 

 ditiused and not less ancient, of races of giants which have peoj).led the world in 

 its tirst ages. 



The traces of the revolutions of our globe have, therefore, at all times im- 

 pressed the minds of men, but they long impressed them in vain, and only with 

 a fruitless astonishment. For a long time, indeed, ignorance Avas carried to such 

 a point that an opinion very nearly universal, and 1 speak not here of popular 

 opinion, but of the o])inion of savants and philosophers, regarded the stones 

 charged with the impressions of animals or plants and the shells found in the 

 earth as sports of nature. " It was necessary," says Fontenelle, " that a common 

 potter, who knew neither Latin nor Greek, should dare, about the end of the 

 sixteenth century, to say in Paris, and in the face of all the doctors, that the 

 fossil shells were real shells, deposited heretofore by the sea in the places where 

 they were then found ; that animals had impressed on the figure-bearing stones 

 all their different figures, and that he should boldly defy the whole school of 

 Aristotle to contest his proofs." 



• This potter was Bernard Palissy, renowned for having made barely a first step 

 in a route traversed since then by so many great men, and which has conducted 

 them to such astonishing discoveries. In truth, the ideas of Palissy could 

 scarcely be expected to attract notice at the ei)och when they api)eared, and it 

 was not till about a century later — that is to say, toward the close of the seven- 

 teenth century — that they began to revive, and, again to recall an expression of 

 Fontenelle's, " to thrive in the world as they deserved to do." But from that 

 time such was the activity put i'orth, both in collecting the remains of organized 

 bodies buried beneath the surface of the earth and in studying the strata which 

 contain them, and under this twofold relation so rapidly were significant facts 

 multiplied, that some bold and persj)icacious minds were not afraid even then to 

 combine them iti generalizations and attempt to ascend to their causes. It was, 

 in effect, at the close of the seventeenth centuiy, and during the first half of the 

 eighteenth, that the celebrated systems of Burnet, Leibnitz, Woodward, Wins- 

 ton, and Biiffon made their appearance — all of them premature and more or less 

 erroneous, no doubt, but productive of this advantage, that they iiccust(m)ed the 

 human intellect to contemphue these astounding phenomena in a philosophic 

 spirit, and not to shrink from measiuing itself against them. 



Another advantage, of even greater moment, was, that all these systems, by 

 exciting a strong interest, presently drew together from all jiarts observations at 

 once more numerous, precise and c()mi)hjle ; the first effect of which was to over- 

 turn all that was imaginary and al»sunl in those systems; and the second, to 

 found on their ruins the true theory, the positive history of the earth. 



The eighteenth century, which advanced so raj)idly in so many directions, per- 

 haps witnessed nothing more rapid than the progress of the science of which 

 we are speaking. The same century which in its first moiety had seen all the 

 systems just spoken of, structures as brilliant as frail, either rise or fall, this cen- 

 tury saw, in its second, the first fouiidations of the enduring monument which 

 was to succeed them, cast by the hands of a Pallas, a Deluc, a do Saussure, a 

 Werner, a Bliunenbach, a Camper, and others who so ablv seconded them. 



Among these advances it is proper that I should here es})ecially recall those 



which relate to the fo.ssil remains of organized bodies. It was these remains, in 



effect, subsisting witnesses as they are of so many revoluti(jns, so many violent 



subversions sustained by the globe, which had given rise to the first hypothesis 



9 s 



