426 ON THE GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS 



It is asserted that genera as well as species change 

 with the strata. That is not true ; the answer is 

 given already in comparing the lower and the higher; 

 it might he rendered overwhelming from any ca- 

 talogue. But this question will recur in another sec- 

 tion. 



Respecting the relative antiquity of different ani- 

 mals, it is imagined that the oviparous are more 

 antient than the viviparous quadrupeds, and that they 

 existed together with fishes only. And because of 

 certain successions of these found in the tertiary 

 strata of Paris, different imaginary dates have been 

 assigned for certain sets. I hope that I have an- 

 swered what relates to the oviparous animals : yet it 

 is painful to see an able philosopher drawing such 

 conclusions from such facts. But there seenr to be no 

 limits to the influence of hypotheses, when they 

 could make even this philosopher forget, in his own 

 peculiar department, that a hog possessed a divided 

 hoof. 



Of the Connexion between Fossil and living organic 

 Bodies, and of Extinctions. 



If it was once thought that no fossil organic beds 

 corresponded to a living one, this supposition has 

 been disproved. But it is said that this correspondence 

 is little or nothing as to the more antient species, and 

 that the resemblances increase in proceeding upwards, 

 till in the most recent, the fossil and the living are 

 identical. But the evidence is unsatisfactory, on 

 nearly the same grounds as before, our ignorance, and 

 chiefly as to what is existing in the present ocean. It 

 is also not philosophical to seek for living resem- 

 blances to fossil bodies in the nearest seas, and to decide 

 on the extinction of the latter from the absence of the 



