184 MEMOIR OF DUCROTAY DE BLAINVILLE. 



complete population, subject to incessant extinctions; and for tliis continuous 

 destruction he requires nothing but slow and ordinary causes. You pretend, 

 he exclaims, that at each of your supposed revolutions the great Author of 

 created beings has recommenced his work ! But observe first the general 

 resemblance which allies the living with the lost species; notwithstanding 

 all your sagacity, you have not succeeded in distinguishing, by any certain 

 criterion, the fossil elephant from the present elephant of the Indies.* You are 

 forced to acknowledge that, among animal fossils, there are many found which 

 differ in nothing from living animals. t The facts on which you found your 

 theory are therefore insufficient and incomplete; and incomplete facta cannot be 

 prescribed as a limit to our conjectures. 



In default of complete facts of which he, no more than Cuvier, is possessed, 

 M. de Blainville seeks a higher reason which may supply its place and deliver 

 his impatient spirit from the pain of hesitation. This higher reason seems to 

 him to consist in the unity of the kingdom of nature; and here science is indebted 

 to him for an important step in advance. So long as he had confined himself 

 to'the study of present species, the animal scries had everywhere presented to 

 him gaps and vacuities; everywhere beings were found wanting. At this 



species of smaller hears pertaining to the same orders, the same families, and to the same 

 Liun£ean genera with those which still live on the earth, "are not, however, always of hke 

 species ; but thej fill in an admirable manner the gaps which the living animal series at 

 present offers." {Suh-iirsus.) "As a definite conclusion," says M. de Blainville, "we find 

 in the dinothcrias, which seem to have disappeared at a very early period from the surface 

 of the earth, a step, a term in that animal series which religious philosophy, the only true and 

 good one, unavoidably accepts, but which science demonstrates the more easily in propor- 

 tion as the question is judiciously considered, and a greater number of elements can be 

 employed." (Dinotheriutn, p. 61.) 



Proposition 3. The extinct races have perished through natural causes, which are still 

 acting every day. " The largest species are those which have first disappeared ; and we may 

 even now observe that the same thing is taking place under our eyes in regard to the species 

 still existing on the surface of the earth." (Suh-urstis, p. 116.) "The rhinoceros is in the 

 condition of the elephants, which, because of their great size and their biennial uni-parturi- 

 tion, perish earlier — that is, first among terrestrial animals — as a consequence especially of 

 the multiplication of the human species upon the earth." (Rhinoceros, p. 221.) He says of 

 some species of fossil viverra : "These species have disappeared, as we see disappear at 

 present, by little and little, the genet, the civet, and the ichneumon, though half domes- 

 ticated." {Viverra, p. 94.) 



Proposition 4. There has not since the creation of living beings been any general and 

 extraordinary revolution of the globe. M. de Blainville says, in speaking of bears: "A 

 single species of this genus has ceased to exist, a species which in Europe completed the 

 genus, as it is complete in Asia and America ; a feebler species, and inhabiting the part of 

 Europe most anciently civilized, and at the same time, perhaps, the most populous, which 

 must have hastened its disappearance from the number of beings at present in existence ; so 

 that the state of things in relation to this genus would demantl no cataclysm, no change in 

 the present conditions of existence of the earth, but only incessant progress in the develop- 

 ment of the human species in Europe." (Bears, p. 88.) "The bones of fossil small bears 

 might have been carried, whether united or separated, and often already broken, with mate- 

 rials of different nature borne by the atmospheric waters into the places of deposit, where we 

 now find some of them by hazard, without there having been required catastrophe or change 

 in the ambient mediums to determine their destruction." (Sub-ursus, p. J15. ) 



* The fossil elcpltant of M. Cuvier — the mammoth of Russia — is, according to M. de 

 Blainville, only the present elephant of Asia. "The definite result, to which we are con- 

 ducted by a vigorous logic, is that in the actual state of our collections, at least, at the 

 Museum of Paris, it is still nearly impossible to prove that the fossil elephant, of which so 

 many remains are found ii\ the earth, differs specifically from the still existing elephant of 

 India," 



t "There are some doubtful species, which will afiect more or less the certainty of 

 results so long as precise distinctions shall not have been reached respecting them. Tlius, 

 the horses, the buffaloes, which are found with the elephants, have not as yet peculiar 

 specific characters; and the geologists who do not choose to adopt my different epochs for 

 the fossil bones will still be able to derive from them an argument so much the more con- 

 venient as it is from my book they will take it." (Cuvier. Discourse on the Ilecolutions of 

 the Surface of the Globe.) 



