MEMOIR OF CUVIER. 131 



remains of real creatures, the veritable spoils of organized bodies. In 1G70 

 Augustine Scilla renewed the opinion of Palissy and sustained it with vigor. 

 Shortlv after, in 1683, Leibnitz lent to it the authority of his name and genius. 

 Finally, from the first half of the eighteenth century, BufFon reproduced it with 

 still more splendor, and directly made it popular. 



But arc these organized beings, of which innumerable relics ave scattered 

 everywhere, the analogues of those which are now living, whether in the places 

 where these relics are found or in others? or have, indeed, their species, their 

 genera, perished? It is here that the difiiculty lies, and we may well believe 

 tliat this dithculty would never have been resolved, at least with coiiii)lete cer- 

 tainty, as long as the inquiry had been restricted, for example, to the study of 

 f(jssil shells or of fishes. It would have availed little, in efi'ect, to find new 

 shells, new fishes ; we should have been always at liberty to suppose that their 

 species were still living, whether in distant seas or at inaccessible depths. Not 

 so, however, as regards quadrufjeds. The number of these is greatly more lim- 

 ited, especially for the larger species , we may count on attaining a knowledge of 

 all of them — how vastly more easy then to satisfy ourselves whether certain 

 unknown bones belong to one of these species still living, or whether they pro- 

 ceed from such as are lost. 



This it is which gives to the study of fossil quadrupeds a peculiar import- 

 ance and to the deductions which may be drawn from it a force wliich deduc- 

 tions derived from a study of most of the other classes (jould not possess. Buffbn 

 seems t(j have felt this. It was chiefly on the great fossil bones of Siberia and 

 Canada that he sought to sustain the conjecture (foi-, in view of the state of 

 comparative anatomy at the time when he wrote, it could be only a conjecture) 

 of certain lost species. Besides, even this conjecture was so im})erfectly estab- 

 lished in his own mind, at least in relation to quadrupeds, that after having 

 regarded, in his Thcoric de la Tcrve, all the animals to which these extraordinary 

 bones had belonged as lost, he afterwards declared, in his EpO'jKCs de la Nature, 

 that he no longer recfignized more than a single lost species — that which has 

 been called the masfodmi — and that all the other bones in question are merely 

 those of the elephant and the hippopotamus. 



Camper went much further, as might have been expected, for comparative 

 anatomy had not failed to advance by long strides since the days of BufFon. 

 In 1787, in a memoir addressed to Pallas, Camper boldly enunciates the opinion 

 that certain species have been destro3^ed by the catastrophes of the globe, and, 

 moreover, sustains it by the first really positive facts, though still very incom- 

 plete, which had yet been advanced in its support. Thus, in proportion to the 

 determination of fossil bones has been the progress of the idea of lost animals, 

 and it has always been by the light of comparative anatomy that this progress 

 was accomplished. It was, in ettect, this light of com])arative anatomy which 

 had l)een wanting to so many laborious researches of so many naturalists. But 

 it is easy to see that towards the ejjoch of which I speak, tcjwards the close, 

 namely, of the eighteenth century, everything was prepared for the long-sought 

 solution; that the moment was at hand for some revelation, some complete and 

 definitive result respecting these strange and marvellous phenomena. 



The 1st Pluviose, an IV, (February, 1796,) being the day of the first public 

 session held by the National Institute, M. Cuvier read before the assembled body 

 his memoir on iha fossil species of the elephant compared with the living species. 

 It was in this memoir that he announced, for the first time, his views on extinct 

 animals. Thus, on the same day when the Institute opened the first of its public 

 sessions, was (Ji)ened also the career of the greatest discoveries which natural 

 history has n)ade in our age : a singular coincidence, which the history of the 

 sciences should nijt fail to mark and commemorate. 



M. Cuvier had now initiated that brilliant series of researches and lalxjrs 

 which occupied him so many years, and which, during the whole time, called 



