DISCOVERIES IN" THE CELESTIAL SPACES. 733 



his opinion, referable to the sea ; and he distinguished be- 

 tween pelagic and fresh- water formations. Scilla, in 1670, 

 gave drawings of the petrifactions of Calabria and Malta; 

 and among the latter our great anatomist and zoologist, 

 Johannes Muller, has recognised the oldest drawing of the 

 teeth of the gigantic Hydrarchus of Alabama, (the Zeuylodon 

 cetoides of Owen) a mammal of the great order of the 

 Cetacea.* The crown of these teeth is formed similarly to 

 those of seals. 



Lister, as early as 1678, made the important assertion, 

 that each kind of rock is characterised by its own fossils, and 

 that " the species of Murex, Tellina, and Trochus, which occur 

 in the stone quarries of Northamptonshire, are indeed similar 

 to those existing in the present seas, but yet when more closely 

 examined, they are found to differ from them." They are, 

 he says, specifically different.! Strictly conclusive proofs of 

 the truth of these grand conjectures could not, however, be 

 advanced in the then imperfect condition of descriptive 

 morphology. We here indicate the early dawn and speedy 

 extinction of light prior to the noble palaeontoiogical re- 

 searches of Cuvier and Alexander Brongniart, which have 

 given a new form to the geognosy of sedimentary formations. 

 Lister, whose attention had been drawn to the regular suc- 

 cession of strata in England, first felt the want of geognostic 

 maps. Although these phenomena and their dependence on 



* Agostino Scilla, La vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso, 

 Nap. 1670, tab. xii. fig. 1. Compare Job. Muller, Bericht iiber die von 

 H err n Koch, in Alabama gesammelten fossilen Knochenreste seines 

 Hydrachus, (the Basilosaurus of Harlan, 1835; the Zeuglodon of 

 Owen, 1839; the Squalodon of Grateloup, 1840; the Dorudon of Gib- 

 bes, 1845,) read in the Eoyal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, April 

 June, 1847. These valuable fossil remains of an ancient world, wbich 

 were collected in the state of Alabama, (in Washington County, near 

 Clarksville,) bave become, by tbe munificence of our king, tbe property 

 of the Zoological Museum at Berlin, since 1847. Besides the remains 

 found in Alabama and South Carolina, parts of the Hydrarchus have 

 been found in Europe, at Leognan near Bordeaux, near Liuz on the 

 Danube, and, in 1670, in Malta. 



t Martin Lister, in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. vi. 1671. 

 No. Ixxvi. p. 2283. 



$ See a luminous exposition of tbe earlier progress of paleeontojo- 

 gical studies, in Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. 1837, 

 ToL iii. pp. 507-545. 



