MEMOIR OF DUCEOTAY DE BLAINVILLE. 183 



\is that these bones are found there in prodigious quantity, comprising those of 

 the rhinoceros, the elephant, and gigantic ruminants. Who shall be the fortu- 

 nate interpreter of these strange facts ? Gmelin and Pallas conclude that a vast 

 irruption of the sea, from the southeast, could alone have transported into the 

 regions of the north these extraordinary relics, which all pertain to animals of 

 the south. BufFon, now almost an octogenarian, conceives, with more pene- 

 trating insight, the idea of lost species. "The bones preserved in the bosom of 

 the earth are witnesses," he say?, " as authentic as unexceptionable, of the past 

 existence of different colossal species of all the races now in existence." And 

 with eloquent emotion, he adds : " It is with regret that I quit these precious 

 monuments of ancient nature, which my advanced age does not leave me time 

 to examine. This study of beings which have disappeared would alone require 

 more time than remains for me to live, and I can only recommend it to posterity. 

 Others," he continues, " will come after me * * * ;" and the prophecy has 

 been fulfilled. To the honor of our age, Cuvier creates for himself a new art; 

 he touches these scattered remains, and recalls before our astonished eyesj,he 

 extinct races of the earth. 



He interrogates each stratum of the earth, and each yields him a peculiar 

 population. He finds first the Crustacea, the mollusks, the fishes ; then reptiles, 

 then mammals, but mammals of which the race no longer exists : the races 

 which exist to-day he finds only on the present surface of the earth. It follows 

 that life is developed only gradually, progressively; and the admirable theory 

 of the succession of beings arises and offers itself as the surest deduction from 

 the best-established observations. There have been, according to Cuvier, re- 

 peated but ^«r('/a/ «??(^ successive creations: these multiple populations have 

 gone on improving at the same time that they were diversified ; and for the sud- 

 den disappearance of so many species at once, nothing less could have been 

 necessary than violent and abrupt causes. 



M. de Blainville takes up each of these propositions, one after the other, and 

 contests them all,* He adopts a single and simultaneous creation ; a first and 



* The following four propositions, whose elements are drawn from his great work on 

 Osteography, form a. comprehensive summary of the ideas of M. de Blainville on paleon- 

 tology : First, a creation, single and consequently complete ; secondly, that creation, com- 

 plete at the moment when it proceeded from the band of God, becomes afterwards incom- 

 plete in proportion as species perish, for each race becoming extinct leaves a gap; thirdly, 

 causes the most natural, the most simple, tbe action of man, &c., have sufficed to destroy 

 the extinct races, as they still suffice to destroy before our eyes the living races ; fourthly, 

 there is therefore no need, in order to explain these continuous destructions, of having 

 recourse to general and extraordinary revolutions, to cataclysms. 



Proposition 1. There has been but one creation. "We may find here," says M. de Blain- 

 ville, with reference to the manatee, "a new proof that the fossil species, whose analogues 

 we no longer recognize, are but extinct terms of the animal series produced by the tbonght 

 of the creative power, and by no means, as has been too often said, and is still repeated 

 every day, the remains of an ancient creation, which has given place to a new and more 

 perfect one — an assertion easy to make, but incapable of being sustained by any legitimate 



{iroof in favor of so rash an opinion." {Manatus, p. 128.) In speaking of palwoiheritim, 

 le says: "Although none of these species have been found alive, we are yet forced to con- 

 clude that it is impossible to admit with certain naturalists that they can be considered as a 

 primitive form of some existing species which are but a transformation of them, and still less 

 that these have replaced them in consequence of a new creation, as many say, without godd 

 reasons it is true, since we have shown tbat they till an actual chasm in the intelligilile 

 series created by divine power for an intelligent purpose." (Palceothcriums, p. ISo. ) With 

 reference to two or three fossil species of the rhinoceros, he says: "There are two or three 

 links of the animal series which have been destroyed before other congeners, existing still 

 in less inhabited parts of the ancient continent, and which can in no manner be considered as 

 transformations of the former, and still less as the product of a new creation, as it is at 

 present somewhat the fashion to suppose for each stratum of the sedimentary formations." 

 Rhinoceros, p. 222.) 



Proposition 2. This single creation, at first complete, presents at present vacancies which 

 extinct species supply. "These mammals," says M. de Blainville, .alluding to certain 



