GAUDRY AND EVOLUTION—GLANGEAUD. 495 
the manner in which the vertebrate type was formed, and also the 
archetype, which has caused so many controversies among zoologists 
and embryologists. 
According to the learned paleontologist, “ vertebrates are not derived 
from animals which conform to the idea of the vertebrate archetype. 
The prototypes of the vertebrates seem, on the contrary, to have 
been remote from the vertebrate archetype, since the archetype is 
supposed to be a compound of vertebrae, placed end to end and little 
modified, while the principal character of the most ancient verte- 
brates appears to have been that their vertebral column was incom- 
pletely formed. The oldest primary fishes were without vertebre. 
or at least had vertebre the centrum of which was not ossified. 
Equally, the first reptiles possessed remnants of the notochord, the 
elements of which were completely ossified. It can not be said that 
the head of the vertebrates is merely an expansion of the vertebra. 
since the bones of the head and of the limbs were formed before the 
vertebree.” 
These ideas are contrary to the theory of Oken, and many other 
theories, but the important conclusions of Gaudry are firmly based 
on facts. 
4. Fossil man. 
Before the appearance of his great work on Pikermi (1859) the sci- 
entific mind of Gaudry was arrested by another subject, which had 
equally raised very heated and, at times, violent discussions. It had 
to do with the discovery of fossil man, as asserted by Boucher de 
Perthes at the beginning of the quaternary epoch, a diseovery denied 
or strongly disputed. In order to solve this problem, Gaudry under- 
took excavations at St. Acheul (Somme), a locality destined to be- 
come as celebrated as Pikermi, and he himself collected in the quater- 
nary alluvium flints chipped by man, associated with bones of animals 
now extinct—large cattle, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the mammoth (£7e- 
phas primigenius), and the hippopotamus. Thus was irrefutably 
demonstrated this contemporaneity which had been denied by some. 
This work formed the first rational scientific basis for a classification 
of the quaternary formations, which later was the object of an 
important treatise (Materials for the history of the Quaternary age), 
prepared in association with one of his young pupils, M. Marcellin 
Boule, who to-day is his successor. 
The series of works of which we have spoken, works so original 
that each marks an epoch in paleontology, led to the appointment 
of Gaudry as professor of paleontology in the Museum’ of Natural 
History, in the place of Lartet (1872). He had there, as a labora- 
tory, a small and dark apartment, with brick floors and worm-eaten 
windows that looked into the “ Whale court.” Paleontological col- 
