38 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



founder of paleontology. Many had asserted, as we 

 have seen, that fossil remains were the exuviae of 

 what were once living animals, but no one before 

 Cuvier had a true conception of their relation to the 

 existing fauna of the globe. At the close of the 

 last century this profound naturalist commenced an 

 exhaustive study of the rich fossiliferous rocks of 

 the Paris basin, and was soon able to announce to 

 an astonished world that the fossils there discovered 

 were not only the remains of animals long since ex- 

 tinct, but that they belonged to species and genera 

 entirely different from any now existing. To the 

 amazement of men of science he proved the exist- 

 ence of a tropical fauna in the latitude of Paris, and 

 exhibited animal forms totally unlike anything now 

 living. His discoveries carried men's minds back to 

 times far anterior to the Deluge of Noah ; back to 

 epochs whose remoteness from our own is to be 

 estimated by hundreds of thousands and millions of 

 years. The theory that the fossiliferous strata of the 

 earth were deposited by Noah's Flood was proven 

 to be untenable and absurd, and it was therefore 

 relegated definitively to the limbo of fanciful spec- 

 ulations and exploded hypotheses. Thinking men 

 were compelled to recognize the fact that the 

 world is much older than had been imagined ; that 

 far from having been created only a few thou- 

 sand years ago, it had been in existence for many 

 millions of years ; and that many strange forms of life 

 had inhabited the earth long before the advent of 

 man on our planet. Further investigations carried 

 on by Brongniart, Cuvier's collaborator, by D'Or- 



