LES REVOLUTIONS DU GLOBE 13 



As to the process by which this renewal was effected, 

 it has often been made a reproach to Cuvier that 

 he admitted, in its turn, another hypothesis quite 

 as incapable of scientific demonstration as the last, 

 to wit, that of successive creations. This, again, is 

 an absolutely unjustifiable criticism. Nowhere in 

 the work of Cuvier is the word " creation " to be met 

 with, and we have only to read attentively the Dis- 

 cours sur les Revolutions du Globe to see that in the 

 mind of the illustrious scholar it was simply a ques- 

 tion of the invasions of new animal forms suddenly 

 arriving from distant and unknown countries. 

 Here the idea is fundamental enough to warrant 

 its quotation : " Moreover, when I maintain," says 

 Cuvier, " that the beds of rock contain the bones 

 of several genera and the friable strata those of 

 several species which no longer exist, / do not 

 assume that a new creation was necessary to produce 

 the existing species. I simply say that they did not 

 exist in the same places, and must have come 

 there from elsewhere. Suppose, for instance, that 

 a great irruption of the sea were to cover the con- 

 tinent of New Holland with a mass of sand ; it 

 would bury in it the corpses of kangaroos, phasco- 

 lomes, dasyures, perameles, flying phalangers, echid- 

 nse, and ornithorhynci, and would entirely destroy 

 the species of all these genera, since none of them 

 exist in other countries. 



" Let this same cataclysm turn into dry land the 

 numerous small straits which separate New Holland 

 from the continent of Asia, and it will open up a 

 passage to rhinoceroses, buffaloes, horses, camels, 

 tigers, and all the other Asiatic animals, which will 



