212 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



came to be interested in geological questions. He tells 

 himself that some Terebratulm from the rocks at Fecamp 

 suggested to him the idea of comparing the fossil forms 

 with living organisms. When he settled in Paris, he 

 pursued this idea, never losing an opportunity of studying 

 the fossils to be found in the different collections. He 

 began by gathering together as large a series as he could 

 obtain of skeletons of living species of vertebrate animals, 

 as a basis for the comparison and determination of extinct 

 forms. As a first essay in the new domain which he was 

 to open up to science, he read to the Institute, at the 

 beginning of 1796, a memoir in which he demonstrated 

 that the fossil elephant belonged to a different species 

 from either of the living forms. Two years later, having 

 had a few bones brought to him from the gypsum quarries 

 of Montmartre, he saw that they indicated some quite 

 unknown animals. Further research qualified him to 

 reconstruct the skeletons, and to demonstrate their entire 

 difference, both specifically and generically, from any known 

 creatures of the world of to-day. He was thus enabled to 

 announce the important conclusion that the globe was once 

 peopled by vertebrate animals which, in the course of the 

 revolutions of its surface, have entirely disappeared. 



These discoveries, so remarkable in themselves, could 

 not but suggest many further inquiries to a mind so 

 penetrating and philosophical as that of Cuvier. He 

 narrates how he was pursued and haunted by a desire to 

 know why these extinct forms disappeared, and how they 

 had come to be succeeded by others. It was at this point 

 that he entered upon the special domain of geology. He 

 found that besides studying the fossil bones in the cabinet 



