CHAPTEE III 



THE THEORY OF SUCCESSIVE CREATIONS 



Alcide d'Orbigny, d'Archiac, and Agassiz The catalogue of fossil 

 beings The extinction and the sudden appearance of species. 



THE researches of Cuvier had been almost ex- 

 clusively directed to vertebrate animals ; but 

 while his fine work was proceeding, other palaeonto- 

 logists such as Lamarck, Bruguieres, A. Brong- 

 niart, d'Orbigny, Deshayes, and Marcel de Serres, 

 in France ; Von Schlotheim, Leopold de Buch, 

 Zieten, Reinecke, and Goldf uss, in Germany ; Parkin- 

 son, Brander, Mantill, and Sowerby, in England ; 

 Eichwald, in Russia ; Nillson, in Sweden ; Brocchi, 

 Cortesi, and Fortis, in Italy to quote only the earliest 

 names were actively drawing up an inventory of 

 marine fossils, such as molluscs, echinoderms, polyps, 

 bryozoa [sea mosses], and foraminifera, from that 

 time indisputably recognized as extinct species char- 

 acteristic of the geological horizons in which they are 

 found. In the first half of the nineteenth century 

 we witness the brilliant expansion of stratigraphic 

 palaeontology , which was soon to take a synthetic form 

 in the Index Palceontologelicus of Bronn (1848), in 

 which the species are catalogued in geological order, 

 and in the Prodrome de Paleontologie Stratigraphique 

 of Alcide d'Orbigny (1850). This last work con- 

 tains an orderly enumeration of eighteen thousand 

 c 17 



