319 
ArricLe XIII. 
On numerous Animals of the Chalk Formation which are still 
to be found in a living state. By Dr. C. G. ExRENBERG*. 
[Read in the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin on the 17th and 31st of 
October, 1839, and 16th of January, 1840, with subsequent additions. ] 
INTRODUCTION. 
THE most careful researches of modern times have uniformly 
tended to confirm the opinion, that only in the upper and 
most recent molasse and tertiary strata of the earth’s crust 
fossil remains occur, which are identical not merely with ge- 
nera, but even species of existing organisms ; and that all the 
organic forms the remains of which are met with in the sub- 
jacent chalk of the secondary formation, as well as those of the 
_ still lower oolitic and transition formations, are entirely distinct 
from species now living. Upon this result of observation have 
been built theories of the development of organized nature ; and 
the present organic world, including man, has been characterized 
as an entirely secondary one, all the fundamental types of which 
lay preserved piecemeal in the lower and earlier strata of the 
earth; nay, it has been frequently asserted, in the most recent 
physical descriptions of the earth, as a result of the science of 
palzontology, that the now living organisms, together with man, 
are the further periodical development and improvement of 
forms, which being situated lowest in the earth’s mass, are 
therefore naturally and necessarily nowhere at present found in 
a living state. 
George Cuvier’s comprehensive physiological researches of 
1795+, which in 1806 were published at length in the Annales 
du Museum, concisely separated the Vertebrata of the antedilu- 
vian from those of the present world. Leopold von Buch and 
Deshayes have subsequently verified, in numerous forms of 
_* From the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Berlin for 1840. Pub- 
lished also separately in folio by Voss, of Leipzig.—Translated from the Ger- 
man by William Francis, Ph. D., A.L.S. 
+ The younger Camper likewise expressly states in the splendid posthumous 
work of his father, Peter Camper, on the ‘ Anatomy of the Elephant,’ 1802, 
that the merit of the brilliant discoveries relative to the distinction between 
fossil and recent animals had belonged to Cuvier ever since 1795 ; and Blumen- 
bach’s first denomination of the fossil elephant, as Elephas primigenius, al- 
though proper to be retained, is of a later date than Cuvier’s far more compre- 
hensive distinction. 
